Keen On America

“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Douglass. And yet the more we know about this most remarkable American, the more enigmatic he becomes. At first, he was America’s fiercest critic. In the early 1840s he accused the founders of being “little better than a band of pirates” and described the Constitution as a “wicked compact.” By 1851, however, he radically revised his view of that same Constitution, eulogizing it as “a glorious liberty document” that outlawed slavery outright. So why did Douglass change his mind so radically? Is it really possible that he was simultaneously America’s fiercest critic and its greatest fan? That’s the riddle at the heart of Dennis Rasmussen’s new book Frederick Douglass’s American Founding. Rasmussen reminds us that Douglass got his political education from William Lloyd Garrison, the unbending New Englander who burned a copy of the Constitution and ground its ashes under his intolerant heel. Then Douglass — having moved to Rochester, started his own newspaper, and fallen in with Gerrit Smith’s political abolitionists — spent two years changing his mind about the Constitution. His logic was startlingly modern. Scalia before Antonin Scalia. Studying the historic document like a biblical scholar, Douglass argued that it never mentions slavery nor race. So the rights it confers, he argued, belong to all Americans. This exegesis made him more militant than Lincoln, because he argued that such a careful reading of the Constitution demanded immediate emancipation. Was Douglass bought or paid off by Gerrit Smith? Naturally the bitter Garrisonians said he was. But Dennis Rasmussen disputes this, arguing that the timing doesn’t work. What Douglass earned instead, Rasmussen argues, was the right to call himself and his fellow abolitionists the founders’ true heirs, more American than even Lincoln and the Republicans. So no mystery, then. The most familiar face in America confessing, in public, that he had been wrong for a decade. If only we had such political enigmas today. Five Takeaways •       Band of Pirates. Where Douglass started. Escaping slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at twenty, he entered the abolitionist movement under William Lloyd Garrison — editor of The Liberator, organizer of the largest antislavery society, and the man who called the Constitution “an agreement with death and a covenant with hell,” once burning a copy at a rally and grinding its ashes under his heel. Through the 1840s Douglass held the Garrisonian line: the founders were hypocrites who complained about a three-penny tax while kidnapping and enslaving a huge share of the population; the Constitution was not merely flawed but evil, with its three-fifths clause, fugitive slave clause and slave trade clause. And these were not respectable opinions. Rasmussen’s reminder: even in the North, abolitionists were the tiniest and most despised minority in American politics — Garrison was tarred, feathered and dragged around Boston by a rope.•       The Two Years That Changed Him. The conversion ran from roughly 1849 to 1851, and it had a geography. Douglass left the East Coast for Rochester and started a newspaper against Garrison’s wishes, landing in the heartland of the political abolitionists — the Liberty Party, the Radical Abolition Party — who believed slavery should be fought through the ballot rather than outside it. (The Garrisonians held the opposite: to vote at all was to uphold an evil system.) Having to defend his position in print, week after week, exposed him to arguments he hadn’t met. The Garrisonians cried corruption: Gerrit Smith, one of the richest men in America, funded the paper and held the antislavery-Constitution view, so Douglass had been bought. Rasmussen finds the charge both unfair and untrue — the money came after the change of mind was mostly complete — and hears in it the same condescension the Garrisonians showed when they wanted Douglass to narrate his enslavement and leave the philosophical heavy lifting to whiter figures.•       Read the Words on the Page. How do you get from “wicked compact” to “glorious liberty document”? Douglass’s answer was a method, and it is startlingly modern. Forget the intentions of the framers; read the text. The Constitution nowhere mentions slaves or slavery. It nowhere mentions white or black, or any euphemism for racial difference. Its preamble promises to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty. Therefore its provisions apply equally to everyone born here — and the supposedly proslavery clauses can be construed, chapter and verse, to have nothing to do with slavery at all. Rasmussen is honest about the history: as an account of what the framers meant, no, it doesn’t hold — he has written a whole book on the Philadelphia convention, where proslavery framers were plainly present. But as a reading of the words themselves, “it’s far more interesting than you might think,” and Douglass’s case is stronger than anyone expects.•       More Radical, Not Less. The hour’s central correction, and the reason this isn’t a story about a radical mellowing with age. Douglass’s new position went beyond Lincoln’s. The respectable antislavery view of the 1850s was “freedom national” — keep slavery out of the territories, leave it alone in the South. Douglass was among a tiny handful arguing that the Constitution already forbade slavery everywhere and demanded immediate emancipation. And after the conversion he became more militant, not less: more willing to countenance violence against slaveholders and slave catchers, and more emphatic in denouncing a country now openly betraying its own founding law. He also claimed the founders’ mantle for the abolitionists rather than for Lincoln and the Republicans: the founders fought tyranny in their time; we fight it in ours; we are their true heirs. The parallel with the colonists was structural, not moral — he said repeatedly that the tyranny endured by the enslaved was a million times worse than a tax on tea.•       Wrapped in the American Flag. The legacy, and the reason the book lands in 2026. Douglass’s reading made Black Americans constitutionally American by definition: the document recognizes only citizens and aliens, and “I was born here — so I am a citizen, wrapped in the American flag just as much as anyone else.” That argument runs straight through to King’s promissory note in “I Have a Dream,” and underneath the twentieth century’s long argument about whether to claim America or leave it. There are complications Rasmussen doesn’t hide: the Garrisonians and John C. Calhoun agreed the Constitution was proslavery, a strange meeting of minds; his greatest speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, was delivered mostly to white audiences, as most of his subscribers were white; he split with Elizabeth Cady Stanton over whether the Fifteenth Amendment should wait for women; and in later life — a stalwart Republican, entangled with the Freedman’s Bank — he was, as Rasmussen puts it, all too human. And his le...

“Add up all of their wealth — it’s more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined.” — Eric Zwick Yesterday, the democratic socialist Susan Neiman blamed free market economics for all the evils of our age. But the market gives and the market takes. And in America it has minted three million millionaires whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. This human backbone of American capitalism is described in Eric Zwick’s and Owen Zidar’s The Everywhere Millionaire, a book about who is really rich in America and how they got there. Forget Musk and Bezos, Zwick says. The real money is a hot dog man from suburban Chicago with a superyacht called Top Dog. Three million Americans own private businesses worth $5 million or more — dentists, beer distributors, HVAC contractors, Wendy’s franchisees — averaging $25 million each. Their combined wealth, Zwick says, is more than ten times the Forbes 400. And they are everywhere in America, from Walker County, Alabama to the Lake of the Ozarks. Are these millionaires evil? They are certainly obsessed, relentless, bad at hobbies and mostly Republican. But evil? Only perhaps to ideologues resentful of other people’s success. In The Everywhere Millionaire, Zwick and Zidar show — in spite of growing inequality and shrinking opportunity — that the American Dream is still alive. Democrats might take note. Especially if they want to win back power in an America still dependent on Main Street for its prosperity. Five Takeaways •       Three Million of Them. The book’s central fact, and it reorders the American wealth debate: the everywhere millionaires are private business owners with a net worth of at least $5 million, averaging around $25 million, and Zwick and Zidar count roughly three million of them. Add their wealth together and it comes to more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined — not ten times Musk, ten times all four hundred. The market gives and the market takes, as Andrew put it — and here it has minted a class whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. They are also, unlike the coastal fortunes, geographically everywhere: the map lights up rather than clustering in four cities, with the highest average in Walker County, Alabama, and pockets around the Lake of the Ozarks, Aspen and less famous mountain towns. Why haven’t we heard of them? They don’t sell clicks. They run unglamorous businesses — a beer distributor, a dentist with a regional network, an HVAC contractor with trucks around town — and they aren’t buying media companies to be noticed.•       Top Dog. The characters are the book’s pleasure. Dick Portillo started a hot dog stand in suburban Chicago fifty years ago with $1,100, the son of immigrants raised in a housing project; he sold the business decades later and now owns, as Andrew put it, a different kind of housing project in Naples, Florida — the authors found him via yacht registration data, because his superyacht is called Top Dog. Was he moral? Ask Mike Ditka, whose competing Ditka Dogs Portillo set about crushing. “Probably not super moral,” Zwick conceded — which is rather the point: these are not heroes or villains, just people obsessed with growing a business. Larry Miller went from auto parts distributor to dealer to owner of the Utah Jazz (and is pictured giving Karl Malone advice on the pick-and-roll). Junior Bridgeman left the Milwaukee Bucks for the deeply unglamorous business of Wendy’s franchises and made hundreds of millions. Tracy Britt Cool left Berkshire Hathaway to build her own.•       The Accident of 1986. Zwick thinks of the tax code as a house that depreciates and needs repairs. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 — Reagan in the White House, Bill Bradley in the Senate, both of whom had actually paid the old 70% rates as a movie star and a basketball player — was a repair job: kill the loopholes, drop personal rates below 30%. The unintended consequence was enormous. For the first time it made sense to organize a business so that its profits were taxed at the personal rate, and the pass-through revolution followed: S-corporations and partnerships surging, the more profit you made the more you kept. Every subsequent reform sweetened the deal — the Bush cuts, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, made permanent in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Success or failure? Zwick finds elements of both, but won’t call it an unmitigated success: this class’s tax benefits are a real part of today’s fiscal problem. One unambiguous gain — pass-throughs linked owners to businesses in the data, which is precisely how this book became possible.•       Bad at Hobbies. What are they actually like? The typical everywhere millionaire is a white man in his late fifties or early sixties, married, with a college degree — though roughly a third of star entrepreneurs in the data are women, across eight million founders over twenty years. From fifty to seventy-five detailed interviews, the unifying theme isn’t brains: test scores turn out to be a weak predictor. It’s ordeal — sleeping on the work table in the back of the shop, years of not knowing whether it would work, a relentlessness that beats IQ. They credit luck too, and macro trends they caught early. And the tax code? “Not the first thing or even the fourth thing” driving them; raise their taxes a little and they wouldn’t notice, though they do decamp to Nevada or Florida when they retire. They’re obsessed with the business at the expense of hobbies and, sometimes, family — which makes divorce, in Zwick’s dry formulation, a naturally occurring wealth tax. Not a guarantee of happiness. Also: if your parents are in the top 1%, you are six times likelier to found a star business than someone from the ninetieth percentile.•       The Power They Don’t Advertise. The half of the book that complicates the good news. Survey data from PPP loan recipients shows this class skews Republican and cares about regulation and taxes rather than the social issues that dominate the feed — but Zwick was struck by how many Democrats there are among them, which explains why certain policies stay off the table even when Democrats hold power. Because they are dispersed, there are everywhere millionaires in every congressional district; they don’t run for office, they fund the people who do, and their influence shows up most sharply in local and state policy — including, sometimes, restricting entry and raising prices in exactly the markets where affordability bites. Trump, for the record, is not one of them: his wealth came through media and then political power, and he was born into the top 0.1%. Zwick’s advice for Democrats chasing this class, on the day after Jentleson’s big-tent argument: stop knee-jerk vilifying people who build businesses, and pay attention to problems as they are rather than as they appear in the Twitter feed. His advice for everyone else: walk down Main Street and ask who owns what. “Is a tax on 50 billionaires gonna move the needle at all? Not really.” Andrew’s verdict: evil only perhaps to ideologues resentful of other people’s success — and proof that, despite growing inequality and shrinking opportunity, the American Dream is still alive. About the Guest 

“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman Susan Neiman is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans, her 2019 treatise about race and the memory of evil. And now Call It Evil, an attempt to understand the Trump era which offers an alternative history of contemporary economics. So what, exactly, is “evil”? Rather than defining what she describes as our most “explosive” word, she gracefully dances around it with all the elliptical subtlety of a clever philosopher. In spite of its Trumpian subtitle (“Understanding the Trump Era”), the book isn’t an inventory of Trump’s crimes. Instead, it investigates why half of America accepted a man whose (evil?) character was already blatantly self-evident. Her answer focuses on economics rather than politics. The major source of evil in our age, she argues, is an ideology built on a falsified Adam Smith — self-interest as the whole of human nature — propped up by evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, and sold so effectively that we now mistake it for common sense. In a word: neo-liberalism. The (a)moral universe of the Heritage Foundation, Milton Friedman and Margaret “there is no alternative” Thatcher. So is capitalism evil? Yes, the philosopher suggests, quoting Einstein and borrowing from contemporary economists like Amartya Sen. But rather than a return to Marx, she wants us to reimagine the 19th century Kantian socialist, Eduard Bernstein, in the context of the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Rather than evil, Neiman really is a philosopher of the good. She wants us to imagine that gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Doing good means standing up to evil, she says. Like Henry Fonda’s performance as the morally defiant juror in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men. Five Takeaways •       Why She Won’t Define It. Evil is “the most explosive word we have,” and Neiman refuses to reduce it to a sentence — as, she notes, Kant refused before her. It is not a theological concept (the Bible itself shows moral concepts precede theological ones); it is the point at which the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be becomes so large “that we don’t know how to live in a world where that abyss opens up.” Children spot the gap first, though they call it unfair: the bully in the sandbox is the first lesson in a world that contains injustice. Her real argument is strategic. We have become afraid of moral concepts because we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for them — and the cost of that squeamishness is that the word passes to the polemical and the demonizing. Andrew pressed her twice on the dodge; her answer, eventually, was sharp: she is not unwilling to use the word, she is simply more interested in analyzing it than defining it — which is why she has called both the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response evil, two entirely different kinds, and why any single definition covering both would let one of them off.•       The Falsified Adam Smith. The book’s core, and its surprise: a moral philosopher writing about economics. The major source of evil in our time, Neiman argues, is the ideology derived from a bad and simplistic reading of Adam Smith — that we are driven by self-interest and nothing else matters — a reading she calls not a simplification but a falsification, touted by Milton Friedman and still pumped out daily by the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Reinforcing it: evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, explaining that altruism is a puzzle and that we know how hunter-gatherers thought two hundred thousand years ago (we know almost nothing). Is capitalism evil, Andrew asked — the question she never quite answers in print. “Oh, I do, actually,” she said, and reached for Einstein, a committed socialist who said so all his life. Her favorite Thatcher line isn’t “there is no alternative” but the quieter one: economics is the method, the object is to change the soul. That, she says, is exactly what has happened — and when someone tells you at dinner that human nature is just that way, they are making a philosophical claim without knowing it.•       Not a Book About Trump. Andrew put it to her that Call It Evil is barely about Trump, and got a flat correction when he pushed further: “I really think you’re twisting my arguments.” No, she does not say we are all evil. The point of the book is not to count his sins — for that, read Haberman and Swan, “a sickening” but excellent reminder of flooding the zone — but to ask how even half the country accepted him a second time, knowing everything. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of the ideology: unabashed, unashamed self-advantage in the most powerful job on earth, “a way of giving permission” for everyone else to behave the same way. Against that: the woman helping a stranger with a baby carriage on the subway stairs, and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, who died protecting a neighbor’s rights. We know not everyone is evil because we all have such moments. And the 9/11 quotation Andrew found most revealing of all — Trump noting that his building was now the tallest in New York.•       Socialism Needs More Kant. The alternative tradition, and the hour’s intellectual heart. Neiman is a Kantian — the human condition as the struggle between the world as it is and as it ought to be, with an innate sense of justice we are born capable of but not guaranteed. Against Kant she sets Hume (custom, habit, emotion: fine for ordinary life, useless when a society is built on slavery or colonialism and someone wants to challenge it) and, behind him, the Nietzscheans. Her hero is Eduard Bernstein, the German social democrat who said socialism needs more Kant, an early champion of women’s and gay rights, in London during Wilde’s trial, who voted against the First World War. What Bernstein saw in Marx is what she rejects: that ideas are superstructure, “the foam on the beer,” while economics is the drink underneath. Her contemporary proof is Zohran Mamdani, whose win everyone credited to affordability — halal sandwiches, daycare — but who always framed it as justice: it is unjust that the teachers, nurses, taxi drivers and sanitation workers who keep New York running cannot afford to live in it. And Rawls, her teacher, was moving toward a Kantian democratic socialism before the strokes.•       How Ordinary People Behave. On Gaza she is unequivocal — yes, genocide, following Omer Bartov’s careful reversal and the Israeli human rights organizations, though she notes the gap between genocide and crime against humanity is not gigantic. What drives the global outrage, in her reading, is not antisemitism (millions of Jews are outraged too) but the use of the twentieth century’s one moral consensus — that the Holocaust was evil — to justify another crime: “the use of one evil to justify another is something that’s morally obscene.” Truman’s bomb: evil, and not only for the dead but as the opening salvo of a Cold War we are still paying for. On Arendt: the banality thesis is right — we are endangered less by sadists than by the thoughtle...

Something unprecedented happened yesterday. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei — rivals who rarely agree on anything — all called for an AI slowdown. It came after more and more doomsday warnings from experts which seem to have finally woken Congress up to AI’s potentially existential threat. Axios even claimed that Speaker Mike Johnson is considering canceling the House recess to force members back to the Capitol to discuss the crisis. This seems to have been the week that the AI zeitgeist has finally shifted. Seven days that have changed the AI world. For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, it’s time to shut up or shut down. While he remains a sceptic about the autonomy of AI agents, he recognizes its potential danger. “The minute there is recursive self-learning, there’s no speedometer. It’s either on or off,” he says. “You either control it or you don’t.” In terms of AI policy, he argues, you can’t be half-pregnant. Either leave it alone or flip the off switch. Anything else fudges the issue and allows slippery characters like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to pursue their own agenda. I don’t disagree. The real world, however, is forever half-pregnant. Investment in AI and the upcoming Anthropic IPO are the driving force of the economy. So AI’s existential threat isn’t just to “humanity.” It’s also to American prosperity, a politically existential threat (thus Trump’s opposition to any regulation). So, yes, this was the week that the AI zeitgeist shifted. The die is, indeed, cast. But it’s only the beginning rather than the end of this remarkable story. Pass the popcorn. Predicting the future might be a fool’s game, but it’s certainly going to get real interesting. Five Takeaways •       Calling BS on the Slowdown. The week’s convergence was genuinely new — a Dario Amodei essay warning that humans could lose control, Altman and Musk jumping aboard, all three major papers leading with it, Congress “waking up,” and an Axios scoop that Speaker Mike Johnson is being urged to cancel the House recess. Keith’s diagnosis is withering: it illustrates “the weakness of AI leadership,” swayed by a six-week employee who resigned, wrote an essay, and went on TV. His deeper claim: there is no such thing as AI as an independent actor, so the entire scare is misconstrued — “AI is not dangerous, period.” What the slowdown talk really represents, he argues, is the economic self-interest of incumbents in containing open-source AI — rules that prevent others from playing. Is anything new, Andrew pressed? “The heat is ramped up a notch. That’s about it.”•       No Speedometer. The episode’s logical core. If you believe recursive self-improvement can’t be controlled by humans, and that the agents it produces will be malicious, then slowing down is incoherent — “the only logical thing is not to slow it down, but to shut it down”: no Anthropic, no IPO, a ban. “The minute there is recursive self-learning, there’s no speedometer. It’s either on or off.” Scott Bessent’s speech — the week’s most prescient, in Keith’s view — made the practical version: recursion can’t be stopped, and 3,500 mostly open-source models already sit in the Hugging Face store. Stephen Witt’s NYT taxonomy (shut it down, air-crash investigations, monitoring, the kill switch — with his closing COVID-epidemiologist analogy) gets respect but fails Keith’s test: none of it solves the problem if the problem is real. In AI policy, as Andrew’s intro has it, you can’t be half-pregnant: either leave it alone or flip the off switch — anything else fudges the issue. His counter-gameplay: for AI to threaten humanity it needs biological or nuclear weapons, and that chain of events is “fantastical.” Andrew’s retort — so was hijacking planes into the World Trade Center. Keith: “9/11 is one airplane.”•       The IPO Game. Why would the leaders sound alarms about their own products? Keith’s fork: they’re naive (buying space by taking heat out of the conversation — which won’t work, since demands to stop will only grow) or manipulative. The tell arrived mid-week: Altman told Fortune that OpenAI won’t IPO this year, given the safety discussion — which Keith reads as calling Dario’s bluff. Will Anthropic pull its $2 trillion listing? “I don’t think he is. I think he’s playing a game… a high-stakes game.” Andrew’s materialist reading: with the American economy increasingly dependent on the AI sector and its impending IPOs, nothing gets shut down short of an AI 9/11 or COVID event — the story is now about the whole future of the American economy. Keith’s post-midterm forecast: the White House does nothing, and unless Democrats take both houses, “nothing changes” — markets settle, IPOs happen, AI continues. And his path to peace: most innovations become acceptable only after they deliver the bacon; people must feel AI’s benefits to discount its fears. Andrew’s verdict: the AI zeitgeist has shifted and the die is, indeed, cast — but this is the beginning rather than the end of the story. Pass the popcorn.•       Open Source Wins — China Included. Against Noah Smith’s America-is-winning scorecard, Keith reframes the race entirely: the real contest is open versus closed source — with the Chinese, ironically, in the open camp and the Americans building walled gardens. History’s lesson: “open source leaks like water into every crevice” — the cloud is almost 100% Linux. The week’s stranger revelation: reports that Kimi was routing every query to Claude — “there was actually no Kimi” — plus the training-dependency chain that keeps Chinese models about a year behind. The money agrees with American dominance either way: the FT’s moonshot-capitalism piece has US deep-tech VC at $246 billion (80% of it California) against China’s $105 billion and the UK’s 26 — with the power law concentrating it all into a handful of companies, and Andreessen Horowitz reporting that post-SpaceX-IPO venture returns now dwarf private equity. As for regulation: California’s new chatbot and teen-social-media laws are, per Keith, light and barely policed.•       The Rest of the Week. Starbucks’ billion-dollar bet on the coffeehouse as antidote to lonely digital lives — Keith’s analyst verdict: Barnes & Noble tried the sofas, and “the biggest problem is the coffee isn’t very good.” How writers actually use AI, via Every’s interviews: Kevin Roose structured The AGI Chronicles himself, then let AI do what he calls three to four years of work in one — exactly, Keith notes, the process behind his own The Human Dividend. The Edmans crossover, from Monday’s interview of the week: do smart people make dumb investments? Keith’s Wall Street history says the best investors are “working class street smart kids” who smell deals — inventors are not gamblers — though Musk is the exception, and as for Dario: “I think Dario would be good at anything,” Andrew offered. “He’s pretty good at politics.” Apple’s iPhone Duo foldable arrives with, per Ben Thompson, still no AI strategy — while Facebook ships Muse, a full agent with a virtual machine that would need 27 million physical computers at Meta scale. And farewell to Bill Draper — among the first venture capitalists, first into Skype before his son Tim, a seeker of contrarian difference “a bit like AI now.” About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of the That Was The...

“One believes in democracy and the rule of law, and right now, the other doesn’t.” — Adam Jentleson Yesterday, William Hitchcock explained FDR’s ability to build and maintain supermajorities. Today, Adam Jentleson — Harry Reid’s former deputy chief of staff and chief of staff to John Fetterman — talks about how the Democrats can build lasting power in the 21st century. The strategy is laid out in Supermajority, Jentleson’s follow-up to the acclaimed Kill Switch. Is the Democratic Party too woke? “We are still too rigid” is Jentleson’s euphemistic take on the dramatic class flip in American politics. JFK won two-thirds of working-class voters in 1960, Jentleson reminds us, while Kamala Harris lost two-thirds in 2024. His prescription is FDR-style heterodoxy. Dems need to hold to their core commitments (healthcare, the safety net, progressive taxation, civil rights) while broadening their base in red states. His examples of tent wideners include a Kansan megachurch pastor, a pro-drilling Alaskan candidate, and an Iowan hopeful whose flat “no” on trans sports silenced a right-wing radio host. The model for winning back the working class, Jentleson argues, is Bernie Sanders circa 2016, an economic populist, but to Hillary Clinton’s right on immigration and guns. The much maligned John Fetterman, Jentleson’s old boss, is the cautionary tale. It’s what happens, Jentleson warns, when the fighting “becomes the entire point” and a politician comes unmoored from principle. Jon Ossoff, Jentleson suggests, seems the anti-Fetterman in writing his own speeches and appearing authentic rather than opportunistic. Ossoff certainly isn’t FDR, but he might be the best chance the Dems have of defeating an increasingly authoritarian Republican party in 2028. Five Takeaways •       The FDR Lessons Nobody Tells. Picking up where yesterday’s Hitchcock episode left off: FDR built the New Deal supermajority not by bowling opponents over with progressive rhetoric but through a deeply heterodox coalition — including factions today’s Democrats would expel — and sold it in conservative wrappers: Social Security pitched as fiscally responsible and earned, not given (he railed against the dole in cabinet meetings). The uncomfortable ledger: FDR actively worked against every civil rights bill of his era to keep self-declared white supremacists in the tent — which means, Jentleson argues, that today’s trade-offs (a Kansas candidate with questions about trans sports, a border-security Democrat) “pale in comparison” to the compromises that built the twentieth century’s Democratic dominance. The Kansas case in point: megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, running in a state Trump won by twenty points, holds the line on healthcare, the safety net, and progressive taxes — and the alternative to his heterodoxy is a MAGA senator.•       Too Rigid, Not Too Woke. Asked the New Yorker’s question — is the party still too woke? — Jentleson answers with his own euphemistic diagnosis: “we are still too rigid.” The evidence is the class flip: JFK won about two-thirds of working-class voters; Harris lost about two-thirds, while the college-educated — once the party of Romney, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower — became the Democratic base. And the sociology cuts deep: education correlates with ideological rigidity, while working-class voters hold heterodox mixes — the focus-group regular who wants the 2008 CEOs jailed and undocumented immigrants deported in the same breath. Hence the echo-chamber problem (Andrew’s San Francisco testimony included): the decline of unions, parties, and Elks halls narrowed the aperture to funders and interest groups, and the Harris circle heard only itself. The fix costs nothing: choose diverse advisers, model good-faith disagreement — a preview of next week’s Susan Neiman conversation — and collect what Jentleson calls the electoral windfall waiting for whichever party does it first.•       It’s Working Right Now. To Andrew’s two-state-solution objection — lovely in theory, impossible in practice — Jentleson answers from the November polls: Mary Peltola leading in Alaska (Trump +double digits) as a pro-drilling Democrat; James Talarico leading in Texas as a fossil-fuels-as-bridge Democrat; and Rob Sand in Iowa, whose flat “no” on a right-wing radio show — the host admitted he’d prepared follow-ups for the expected wriggle — took the wedge off the table and freed his anti-corruption message. As recently as 2009, he reminds us, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, both Dakotas, Louisiana, and Montana. The forgotten exemplar: Bernie Sanders 2016 — economically populist but a 2007 immigration-bill no vote, “open borders is a Koch brothers proposal,” Lou Dobbs appearances, and gun rights to Hillary’s right — the heterodox mix that produced his crossover appeal, against Clinton’s across-the-board orthodoxy. Jentleson’s 2028 read: the primary won’t resolve for the left, and Ossoff, Cooper, and Peltola are the model — though he tips his hat to the DSA’s weeknight commitment to Robert’s Rules.•       The Fetterman Cautionary Tale. The hour’s most personal stretch: Jentleson was John Fetterman’s chief of staff, and his verdict on his old boss — who cameoed at Trump’s convention this week — is that Fetterman shows what happens when the heterodox strategy is “taken too far”: the fighting “has become the entire point of his career,” unmoored from the principles that make divergence meaningful. On the Wall Street Journal’s reporting — the children’s hospital he refused to meet, the York police funerals he skipped — Jentleson wasn’t a source (“if you’re going to say something, you should say it on the record and put your name on it”) but confirms it “resonated with my experience.” His primary emotion: “sadness and regret… he’s letting a tremendous number of people down, including the people of Pennsylvania, who are basically down a senator.” The lesson for the book’s own thesis: heterodoxy is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it needs to stay rooted in why you entered politics at all — or it leads “to some dark places.”•       The Vision Thing. Why supermajority and not Madisonian faction? Because, Jentleson argues, this era has something genuinely new: “the first time in American history where we have one political party that is entirely aligned with a sympathy towards authoritarianism” — not flashes like McCarthy or Father Coughlin (yesterday’s villain, returning), but a party whose convention this week featured Trump leading “a pledge to cheat in elections,” with no internal pushback. (FDR’s court-packing, by contrast, was the exception proving the rule: the system brushed him back in 1938.) Hence the pull quote — and yet democracy-talk alone doesn’t win: “Biden tried to run on soul of the nation… and it didn’t work.” The closing agreement, via Andrew’s wrapper argument: the New Deal and the Great Society were named visions; Clinton and Obama never articulated one. Jentleson’s candidate: finish FDR’s cradle-to-grave social insurance — wage insurance against AI’s disruptions, everything earned rather than handed out, aimed at bank accounts and the pump rather than the soul of the nation. And his 2028 intrigue, on the record: Jon Ossoff — the anti-Fetterman — who writes his own speeches, wins Georgia repeatedly, and conditioned aid to Israel early enou...

“We’ve taken our democratic functioning for granted, and we’ve forgotten what it looks like to actually have to fight for it.” — William Hitchcock Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, and there’s a lot of sombre talk about the forever wars triggered by the attack. But sometimes, fighting evil might be necessary. So argues William Hitchcock, whose A Shadow Over the World is a major new history of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rise of fascism, and the making of American involvement in World War II. We got the thirties wrong, Hitchcock says. The conventional view is that an interventionist FDR was hamstrung by an isolationist American public. Thus the US’s tardy entry into the war. The truth, Hitchcock argues, is the opposite. Judging from the period’s magazines, radio, films, and plays, he finds that most Americans hated fascism and wanted to act, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe until after Munich. Having become an interventionist, FDR managed the propaganda war with such trademark sophistication that “isolationist” and “appeasement” became the nastiest insults in Washington DC. So insulting, in fact, that American policy makers still deploy them today, with every adversary a new Hitler, every negotiation a new Munich. Because the isolationists ended up as history’s villains, Hitchcock says, we’ve back-projected a narrative in which the 1930s public had its head in the sand and FDR was the lone farsighted interventionist. So the real thirties — featuring a vibrant public conversation about America’s role in the world, with the public actually more anti-fascist than the president — has gotten buried under FDR’s own accomplished myth-making. And then there’s the F word. Are we back in fascist times? Is the 2020s a repeat of the 1930s? The UVA professor lives in Charlottesville, so it’s a particularly timely question for him. Hitchcock sees fascist behavior, he confesses, but not a fascist country. In the face of authoritarianism, he notes, America remains a vibrant democracy. Maybe that’s what the 2020s, with its public resistance to authoritarianism, has in common with the 1930s. History doesn’t repeat itself, as the line attributed to Mr America himself, Mark Twain, has it — but it rhymes. Five Takeaways •       We Got the Thirties Wrong. The book’s revisionist core, against libraries of Roosevelt biography: the standard story — an interventionist FDR hamstrung by an isolationist public — is backwards. From fresh research in the periodicals, radio speeches, films, and plays of 1930s political culture, Hitchcock finds an American public that hated fascism and wanted to do something, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe or Asia from 1933 all the way to Munich in September 1938. His gift, once converted, was finding ways to act short of war — and then vilifying the isolationists so thoroughly that appeasement became the great sin — insults American policy makers still deploy today, with every adversary a new Hitler and every negotiation a new Munich. The thirties Americans were more sophisticated than the caricature: they struggled to fight fascism while avoiding war. The decade, Hitchcock insists, was not a cautionary tale of heads in the sand but “a time much like our own,” when Americans argued about the right role for their country in the world.•       Coughlin, Not Lindbergh. The corrective to Philip Roth: The Plot Against America is a wonderful novel that overstates its villain. Lindbergh came late — speaking out only in 1940, joining America First in spring 1941, by which time “the table was set” and Roosevelt had won the war of ideas; polling showed two-thirds of Americans against Lindbergh’s views. The German American Bund, swastikas in Madison Square Garden notwithstanding, was small. Far more dangerous was Father Coughlin, the radio priest with millions of listeners undermining Roosevelt at every turn. The deeper discomfort: fascism was popular in America later than we like to admit — elites welcomed Mussolini in 1922, dictatorship carried no stigma, and Studebaker sold a sedan called the Dictator until 1937. (“Roth missed the trick,” Andrew noted. It should have been a Ford.) As for the New-Deal-as-fascism charge, leveled then and since: Roosevelt’s own answer — he was saving capitalism by making it fairer — holds, because fascism is not an economic program but war on enemies at home and abroad.•       The Sheriff and the Same Tree. The South’s paradoxes, which deserve a book of their own. In Congress, southern Democrats — including Carter Glass of Virginia, among the most racist senators of a racist era — were ardent interventionists, not least because rearmament dollars flowed to southern military bases. Meanwhile African Americans were the first to recognize fascism, because they already lived under it: “he’s right here in our courthouse… He’s the sheriff. He’s the mayor” — Jim Crow and fascism, branches of the same tree, as the Black press argued years before Pearl Harbor. Hence A. Philip Randolph’s high-stakes poker in 1941: threatening a million-man march he might not have mustered, he extracted the executive order barring segregation in federally funded defense plants — the first federal lever of the modern civil rights era. The enduring puzzle Hitchcock presses on his disbelieving students: America fought and won the great war for democracy with a segregated army. And civil rights remains, in his verdict, one of the biggest stains on FDR’s reputation — Eleanor’s Black Cabinet notwithstanding.•       The Making of a World Power. The trail of tears first: Abyssinia invaded, and America wouldn’t even embargo oil; Spain’s elected government denied weapons while the fascists poured in guns; the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Munich — nothing. The switch, Hitchcock argues, came at Munich: Roosevelt grasped that American military weakness was itself the problem — nothing could deter Hitler’s testing — and by early 1939 the Neutrality Act was being unwound, billions were flowing into a new Navy (even isolationists loved a picket fence around the hemisphere), and 1940 brought peacetime conscription. The supporting cast makes the chapter: Martha Gellhorn’s letters from Spain — “a dress rehearsal of the coming conflict” — reaching FDR through Eleanor; the loathed Chamberlain (“there’s one thing Roosevelt couldn’t stand — condescending Europeans”); the Stalin gamble that made him look a fool at the pact and a prophet at Lend-Lease; and Dorothy Thompson, the Republican journalist expelled by the Gestapo, whose Herald Tribune columns FDR’s speechwriters lifted by the page. And then Hollywood’s convergence: Casablanca — written after its playwright visited Vichy France to rescue his wife’s Jewish family — with Rick as Roosevelt, hesitating in a cafe called White House until he joins the fight, in theaters just as GIs landed in North Africa.•       Not at Midnight Yet. The 2026 lessons, delivered from Charlottesville — Exhibit A, where 2017’s riot was “the kind of thing you could have seen in Weimar Germany.” First: normalization is the danger — the salami tactics of fascists mean “if they can get away with a little slice, they’ll keep slicing,” and the thirties’ sin was depicting Mussolini as harmless. Second: the demonizing instinct should be resisted — pressed on Susan Neiman’s forthcoming Ca...

“I’m a military correspondent, but I would be totally happy if there was world peace and I had to change jobs.” — Yonah Jeremy Bob Oil hit $100 a barrel (again) today. Donald Trump confessed, with uncharacteristic honesty, that the Iran war won’t end until after the November elections. And while Israel’s war with Iran ended back in April, America’s hasn’t, with the US and Iran shooting at each other most of the time since February. So, with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, is this about to become America’s new forever war? Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent at The Jerusalem Post and co-author of In the War Room, the inside story of Israel’s fight against the Iranian “axis.” The Baltimore-born and Jerusalem-based journalist confesses that he watches this conflict with “two brains.” For Israelis of both left and right, it’s a war of survival. His US brain, however, has the more down-to-earth reading of a conflict that offers no existential threat. So is this the new forever war? America after 9/11 “was at war for about a decade,” Bob responds. A nation in post-traumatic shock. A quarter of a century later, most Americans think of today’s Iran war in terms of domestic gas prices. Thus Trump’s presentation of the conflict in the context of an election calendar is not a forever war. Like all things Trumpian, it’s just another transactional campaign. As for the senior military correspondent himself, he’d be totally happy, Bob confesses, if world peace put him out of a job. Five Takeaways •       The Split Screen. Bob — Baltimore-born, Jerusalem-based — says he watches this war with two brains, and they see different wars. The American brain sees a US-Iran conflict that hasn’t stopped: strikes, sabotage, and bombing traded almost nonstop since February 28. The Israeli brain sees a war that ended on April 7 — one 24-hour exception aside — leaving Israel calmer about Iran than Washington is. What actually agitates Israelis this week is diplomatic: Britain and a dozen mostly European countries (plus Canada) sanctioning the West Bank — not Israel proper, but a stain and a loss all the same. On Witkoff and Kushner, whom Ed Luce’s FT column accused of “blind amateurism,” Bob’s ledger is mixed: genuine credit for ending the Israel-Hamas war in October 2025 and bringing home all 250 hostages — the war’s forgotten center of gravity for most Israelis — against failure to close any Iran nuclear deal and near-nothing on Ukraine.•       The Transactional Ally. Bob’s three-level model of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship: lower-official criticism gets ignored; a direct Trump request gets “yes, but”; and a genuine Trump threat gets obeyed — every time. The astonishing exhibit: Israeli aircraft already en route to bomb Iran, recalled mid-flight after Trump tweeted “those aircraft better come back.” Bob can list three or four such episodes; Netanyahu backed off in all of them, because American support is more essential now than ever — which is the second story: Israel’s worst diplomatic isolation in decades, with bipartisan American support frayed and Europe largely gone. The counterweights: India, whose closeness to Israel — military, intelligence, and AI agreements — has never been higher, and the UAE, now closer to Israel than Egypt or Jordan. The original Abraham Accords held through the war; the grand prize didn’t — MBS was publicly “weeks away” from normalization in September 2023, and stopping that clock, Bob believes, is very possibly why Sinwar invaded when he did.•       The Book Bibi Doesn’t Like. In the War Room’s revisionist core: the early-war Netanyahu was the hesitant man in the room — it took roughly three weeks for the rest of the war cabinet to convince him to invade Gaza at all, consistent with a career of avoiding big ground operations — until, with victories in northern Gaza and Khan Younis behind him, he flipped in spring 2024 into the war room’s most aggressive member, pressing on to Hezbollah and Iran as his own defense chiefs turned toward ending it. Netanyahu, Bob reports dryly, dislikes exactly those chapters: “we’re in touch… we got an earful” — from both political directions, which the authors take as evidence they nailed it. On October 7 itself: warnings — including one relayed from the UAE — were ignored by everyone, Netanyahu, the IDF’s Halevi, and the Shin Bet’s Bar alike, all captive to the concept that Hamas was deterred; Bob’s author’s note says all of them should have resigned, as their 1973 predecessors did. The conspiracy theory that Bibi wanted the invasion gets “an unequivocal no.”•       Between Genocide and Mistakes. Andrew put Al Jazeera’s headline to him directly, and Bob — Boston University Law before journalism — answered as a lawyer: on genocide, “unequivocally no,” for want of intent (Bret Stephens’s point: a state that wanted genocide had the bombs to commit it in weeks, and wouldn’t have spent the war moving civilians out of the way). Then he did the arithmetic against his own side’s comfort: of roughly 70,000 dead, about 25,000 were Hamas and 3,000–5,000 were killed by Hamas itself — leaving 35,000 to 45,000 Palestinian civilians. “I think that’s too much.” The army has 150 criminal probes and some 3,000 disciplinary ones open; the World Central Kitchen strike — armed figures misread as Hamas boarding the trucks — stands as his anatomy of a terrible mistake that may yet be prosecuted as gross negligence. The insiders he talks to are genuinely sad about the civilian toll, and on the settlers he goes on record for the brass: top IDF and Shin Bet officials say the police under Itamar Ben-Gvir simply won’t crack down on Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank. “I point the mean finger at” Ben-Gvir — their words, he says, sounded out to the world.•       The Nuclear Scorecard — and the Clock. His Jerusalem Post exclusive, summarized: what triggered June 2025 wasn’t just enriched uranium (Iran had ten weapons’ worth for years) but progress on the “weapons group” — the metallurgy and hemispheres needed to put a warhead on a missile. Today that weapons work is destroyed or inoperable, the vast majority of Iran’s 20,000 centrifuges are gone, and the 60-percent uranium sits under bombed rubble, watched by intelligence services Bob judges too deeply embedded for Iran to move it unseen. Rebuild in one to three years? Theoretically — if Israel and America fall asleep. The strategic errors he’d correct: selling regime change (the IRGC and Basij command hundreds of thousands of hardcore supporters; the messaging failure is now “an element of the current elections”) — and the split verdict stands: Israel’s war succeeded on its existential terms; America’s depends on Hormuz and the program’s end. On 9/11’s eve, his forever-war answer: America itself “was at war for about a decade” after the towers fell, but this one has a clock — Americans feel gas prices, not danger. And the sign-off: a military correspondent who’d be totally happy if world peace cost him the job. About the Guest Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post, with unparalleled access to top...

“The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated.” — Skye Perryman Three years ago, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward Skye Perryman came on the show to wonder what our kids will one day ask us about what we did to confront authoritarianism in America. Now she returns with an answer in the form of her New York Times bestselling Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times about how Americans can reclaim their power, fight for freedom, and reimagine democracy. Her diagnosis is pretty dark. Reminding us that America joined the list of backsliding democracies in 2021, Perryman warns that this descent into authoritarianism is rapidly accelerating. But her central argument inverts the gloom. Hopelessness is a feature, she reminds us, not a bug of our extraordinary times. So, rather than voter suppression or gerrymandering, the number one tool that autocratic actors have is making us feel alone and isolated. Thus her call to agency. She prescribes seven actions including what she calls “information sobriety.” We don’t all have to do everything, she says, but everyone needs to do something. She ends where we began three years ago — with the kids. Skye Perryman dedicates the new book to her son as a way, I suspect, of telling him what she has been doing to confront authoritarianism in America. Ordinary people in extraordinary times, indeed. Five Takeaways •       A Generational Threat. Three years of Democracy Forward’s work, summarized from the courtroom: challenging executive overreach by the Trump-Vance administration, fighting book bans, and managing the fallout of Dobbs. America, Perryman notes, has never been immune to anti-democratic movements — they’ve been here since the founding — but this moment is “unprecedented in many ways”: the question is no longer just whether the country can move toward a democracy that works for everyone, but whether it can hold hard-earned gains like equal rights and voting rights at all. The receipts: the United States was added to the global list of backsliding democracies in 2021 — she and Andrew discussed it then — has stayed on it every year since, and the slide is accelerating, driven in part by a Supreme Court that more often reverses rights than protects them: the fruit, she argues, of a multi-decade far-right project against the civil rights movement’s gains. Even thirteen presidential libraries — Republican ones included — have sounded the alarm.•       Neither Adjunct Nor Partisan. Andrew’s needle — blurbs from Hillary Clinton, JB Pritzker, the late Gloria Steinem, and Stacey Abrams: is Democracy Forward an adjunct of the Democratic Party? — drew her counter-blurb: Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, endorsed the book too. The standard, she insists, is conduct, not letters after names: “we will oppose anyone” who strips constitutional rights, threatens journalists, or sends masked ICE agents into communities — and the administration’s agenda harms Republican voters in red towns like her native Waco as surely as anyone. As for the that’s-just-democracy argument — Trump won, deal with it — she calls it “quite an un-American argument” twice over: nonvoters outnumbered the supporters of either candidate in 2024, and America is not a plebiscite but a democratic republic with a constitution. It doesn’t matter how large the majority: “he can’t jail journalists for what they report. He can’t kill Americans in the middle of the street.”•       Is It Evil? Andrew previewed later this week’s guest — the philosopher Susan Neiman, whose new book calls the Trump-MAGA movement evil — and put the word to Perryman directly. Her answer, from a onetime philosophy major: judged by deeds — stripping families apart, terrorizing communities with masked agents, calling whole groups of people garbage — “if you wanna use the word evil… I’m with you there.” But she draws a practiced line between labeling acts and movements, which she will, and labeling every individual, which she won’t: most Americans of good faith across difference deserve bridges, while much of the president’s movement has operated in bad faith that forfeits them. The same discipline shapes her answer to Andrew’s question about national reconciliation, via the title of Omar El Akkad’s Gaza book (One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This): no backsliding democracy anywhere, she notes, has managed a U-turn “without some measure of truth and accountability.” That reckoning is tomorrow’s work; today’s is holding the administration accountable in the present tense.•       Hopelessness Is a Feature, Not a Bug. The book’s central reframe, previewed in her Rolling Stone essay: the despair so many Americans feel is not a byproduct of the assault on democracy — it is the strategy. “The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated” — deprived of hope and agency alike. Hence action one of seven: stop spiraling and pick up a shovel. Doomscrolling, she argues, is the trap perfected — it feels like civic attention while it exhausts you into paralysis; “they want you doomscrolling.” The exit is communal: show up — even alone — to a No Kings march, discover the crowd feels as you do, and let community produce the conditions for courage, and courage for hope. We can’t control what the administration does each morning; we can control how we respond. The goal is a conversion: from spectators of democratic decline to agents of change, in small and repeatable ways.•       Everyone Needs to Do Something. The practical core. Action two, information sobriety: audit your media diet, learn the difference between news and commentary and between independent and merely accurate journalism, get curious across the spectrum, and keep a healthy intake of the genuinely independent — the AP, ProPublica, NPR — whoever owns the rest. (Andrew’s Murdoch question got the even-handed version: know what’s influencing whatever you read, Breitbart or the Times.) The book meets readers where they are — the exhausted, the seasoned, the unplugged — because its creed is proportion, not purity: “we don’t all have to do everything, but everyone needs to do something.” And it ends at the beginning: dedicated to her son, with a kids’ corner and a chapter called Begin at Your Front Door — democracy lives there, not in Washington, and the young, whose future-visioning she finds more inspiring than their elders’ present fights, deserve to be heard on AI, climate, and the country they’ll inherit. Andrew’s verdict: an optimistic book in what many people insist are our dark times — a way, he suspects, of telling her son what she has been doing to confront authoritarianism in America. Ordinary people in extraordinary times, indeed. About the Guest Skye Perryman is president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a TIME 100 honoree, and a nationally recognized attorney; under her leadership, De...

“A sailor doesn’t control the sea, but understanding the waves matters enormously.” — Mikko Ketovuori Our mood, as always, is miserable. Iran, the price of oil, the AfD, the long-term cancers from 9/11 dominate the headlines. But today’s guest thinks we’ve got the mood wrong. The writer Mikko Ketovuori — who wrote the intro to the Finnish edition of my own The Internet Is Not the Answer — has a new book out, Waves of Change, which is a study of the zeitgeist. Social mood drives events, Ketovuori argues, not the other way around. So the news measures nothing but the mood itself. Are our times actually bad? “No,” Ketovuori insists. Things — from the arts to our abundance of food — are actually pretty good. Today’s perceived misery is, in fact, just the undertow. Surfing the waves of history — from the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century to the 19th century philosophers buried in Highgate cemetery to the swinging Sixties — Ketovuori is actually bullish on our current futures. So buy the future. It will cheer everyone up. Five Takeaways •       Social Mood Drives Events. The inversion at socionomics’ core: we assume events shape our feelings, but the collectively shared, largely unconscious social mood comes first, framing how we interpret everything — the news is “a sociometer,” reflecting the mood rather than the world (in the bright-mooded 1980s, Ketovuori notes, the news simply read better). The field — sociology plus economics — was founded by Robert Prechter, the 1970s Wall Street guru behind Elliott Wave International, with whom Ketovuori has worked for twenty years; the book distills four decades of that tradition, “not totally my idea,” he says with Finnish honesty. And are our times actually bad? No: “actually, we are doing pretty well. You can have access to all the arts, all the books… We have plenty of food. What else do we need?” The misery is the mood — and if you surround yourself with miserable people and search the Internet for miserable news, you will reliably feel miserable.•       The Beatles and the Dow. Prechter founded the theory on a startling correlation between the Beatles’ rise and the Dow Jones average — and Ketovuori ran the replication: Nokia’s share price against the pop music Finland listened to around 2006–2009, published in Cambridge’s Popular Music journal. Music, he argues, reflects social mood almost predictively. The chicken-and-egg question resolves cleanly in socionomics: the sixties made the Beatles, not the reverse — had Lennon and McCartney been born ten years earlier, “the time decides whether you succeed or not.” Which reframes where the next optimism will come from: unknowable in advance, because “optimism comes first, and then we see the fruits” — only afterward do we anoint the artists, writers, and politicians who captured the essence of the era.•       Marx & Spencer, Staring. The book’s set piece — written standing in Highgate Cemetery, a stroll from Andrew’s old school: Karl Marx’s tourist-thronged tomb faces the largely forgotten grave of Herbert Spencer, the Social Darwinist — “the father of capitalism and the father of socialism are staring at each other,” and Ketovuori imagines their conversation after the tourists leave and night falls. Andrew completes the triangle with Highgate’s third resident, Alexander Litvinenko — the Putin-poisoned defector whose polonium killing, Ketovuori marvels via Luke Harding’s reporting, cost something like £50 million “just to wipe out one man. So somebody hated him very much.” The cemetery lesson is the book’s: some things don’t change, they return cyclically — Wagner and mad Ludwig included. Cemeteries, both agree, are creative places.•       The Finnish Corrective. Finland supplies the book’s ballast. The history: the Winter War against Stalin (Hitler’s ally, by the Ribbentrop pact), independence kept “just by fighting back,” then the deck reshuffled by Barbarossa — and, little remembered, Finland driving the Germans from Lapland after 1944. The present: Finnish far right and far left importing American arguments verbatim — “that’s crazy, because we are not Americans” — opinions taken from media rather than lived. And the myth-busting: days before recording, new PISA results showed Finland’s fabled education system “has really gone down.” The thirty-year teacher educator’s advice to admiring Americans: “look to Estonia.” Even education, he notes from a chapter on lecturing at Columbia Teachers College, moves in cycles of idealization and correction.•       A Sailor Doesn’t Control the Sea. The agency question, answered in the episode’s pull quote: we steer our own lives, but the social mood — the sea itself — no one controls. The evidence tour: Disney thrives in optimistic times while 1975’s dark mood produced Taxi Driver and “the movie about the shark” (past guest territory twice over — Scorsese biographer Mark Binelli visits soon); Prechter’s firm, Ketovuori claims, predicted the date of the Crimea war from wave analysis of the Moscow stock exchange; and yesterday’s Edmans episode gets its socionomic sequel in his tulip-mania essay. To Andrew’s closing paradox — American stock-market exuberance and cultural apocalypticism simultaneously, per this week’s Kirsch episode on UFOs — Ketovuori answers “neither” is real, noting the last great UFO panic also preceded a world war. His distinction: technology amplifies mood but doesn’t originate it — the Internet books were euphoric before 2008 and dark after, as Andrew’s own shelf attests. We, the people, decide how to use it. Andrew’s sign-off takes the bullish view: buy the future — it will cheer everyone up. About the Guest Mikko Ketovuori is a University Lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Turku, Finland. His research spans socionomics and herd theory, education policy, and the role of the arts in society; he has lectured across Asia, Europe, and North America, and is the author of Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society. He also wrote the introduction to the Finnish edition of Andrew’s The Internet Is Not the Answer. Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood (Iff Books, October 2026) collects thirteen essays on the tides of collective feeling. He lives in Turku, the old capital of Finland. References: •       Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood by Mikko Ketovuori (Iff Books, October 2026). The publisher’s tagline: history doesn’t repeat itself — social mood does.•       Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society by Mikko Ketovuori, and Robert Prechter’s The Socionomic Theory of Finance — the theoretical foundations.•       The Madness of Markets by Alex Edmans — yesterday’s episode, and the rationalist’s account of the same manias.•       We Want to Believe by Adam Kirsch — this week’s UFO episode; Ketov...

“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe, Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cultural fact. The beauty (if that’s the right word) of the subject, Kirsch argues, is that because UFOs don’t really exist, the flying saucer rumor mill encapsulates the paranoia of our populist age. Ever since the 2017 New York Times exposé of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, it’s an industry that has fed off both the crisis of traditional authority and the suspicion that the people in power know more than they’re letting on. Elites, in other words, know nothing and everything. Simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Underneath this silliness, Kirsch notes, is something more substantial. Perhaps religion itself. Where people once saw miracles or demons, they now see little green-headed creatures packed into flying saucers. In other words, they provide a vocabulary for experiences that we can’t explain, as well as a community with which we can share that mystery. So what happens when the aliens finally show up? As I suggested, maybe these transcendental creatures arrived. We’ve built them ourselves in the form of artificial intelligence. Kirsch agreed, seeing AI as a kind of nonhuman mind that doesn’t experience the world as we do. Such a Copernican moment is “very imaginable,” the sceptic concedes. Disclosure Day. Starring Adam Kirsch. Five Takeaways •       A Pure Thought Experiment. The trilogy’s logic, completed: three short books on popular ideas, this one distinguished by the fact that its subject doesn’t exist — which is precisely its value. UFOs, Kirsch argues, let us think “in a very sort of almost consequence-free way” about who decides what’s real, whose authority we trust, and why people need to believe — the defining questions of a populist moment in which vaccines, public health, and yesterday’s common sense are all contested. The hinge was 2017: the New York Times’s “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” exposé revealed the Pentagon’s AATIP program, and the paper of record saying the government knows more than it admits took UFOs from niche conspiracy to mainstream issue. Kirsch himself started paying attention — smoke that might lead to fire. “Unfortunately, in the years since then, no fire has been discovered.” What he learned instead: how easy it is to be misled, and what scientific evidence actually is.•       ’Oumuamua’s Wager. The book’s treatment of past guest Avi Loeb is a study in the seduction of credentials: an astrophysicist of unimpeachable standing willing to entertain what colleagues won’t — that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been a broken light sail from an alien probe — “kindles the imagination,” Kirsch’s included. But the metal globs from the Pacific floor and the fresh candidates each year breed suspicion, and the standard remains Carl Sagan’s: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Loeb’s reply reworks Pascal — ‘Oumuamua’s wager: believe, because the benefits of an open mind outweigh the cost of being wrong. Kirsch’s honesty cuts through: “I would love to believe in UFOs.” Nothing would be more exciting. Which sharpens the genuine scientific conundrum — the space age promised a galaxy teeming with signals and delivered silence: “Why is Earth so important if it should be so unimportant? Where are all the other Earths?”•       The Archetype of Conspiracy. The disclosure paradigm is eighty years old, and it trained us all: the people in power know more than they’re letting on, there are secret tapes and files, and the people deserve the truth — a template rehearsed on Roswell long before COVID or the Epstein files. Andrew’s gloss: elites, in other words, know nothing and everything — simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The official history runs from Truman’s alarm at the early-fifties Washington flap (if the Soviets can reach our skies, we must know) through the commissions of Ruppelt, J. Allen Hynek, and Edward Condon — whose report closed the file for half a century — to the 2017 AATIP revelation that reopened it, complete with congressional hearings and annual Pentagon reporting requirements. Today’s ledger: military pilots keep reporting lights that move impossibly; 95 percent get explained; the unexplained 5 percent “doesn’t mean that they’re UFOs — it just means there isn’t enough information.” Even the vocabulary tells the story: “UFO,” coined in the fifties to sound neutral, absorbed the flying saucer and had to be replaced by “UAP.” Spielberg’s Disclosure Day — fan service for believers, by Kirsch’s account, and disappointing by Andrew’s — monetizes the same secret-truth appeal that made Close Encounters.•       A Religious Impulse. Why do people believe? The scholar D. W. Pasulka’s “book encounters” supply Kirsch’s answer: someone has an experience they can’t understand, reads the UFO literature, and says this is what happened to me — where a medieval villager would have named a miracle, a demon, or a god. Belief provides a vocabulary for the inexplicable and a community to interpret it with; Jacques Vallée, Silicon Valley’s resident UFO intellectual, adds the perennialist claim that people have always seen strange things in the sky and that they mark “reality beyond our rational mind.” Science fiction serves the same hunger — Kirsch’s own California childhood ran on The Next Generation and Asimov — a sandbox for questions religion once answered: what are humans for, why is mind so out of place in the universe? And the aliens we imagine are always mirrors: Wells’s Darwinian indifference (we are their microbes), the Cold War’s destroyers and moral guides, and now Musk’s Mars — an insurance policy for mind itself against our own extinction. The catch that keeps UFOs at the intersection of science and belief: real aliens must obey physics, interstellar distances forbid the journey, so belief becomes “a big X” — faith that there’s physics we haven’t found. Even Sagan’s Contact, Kirsch notes, resorts to a wormhole. Magic, scientifically dressed.•       The Aliens We Invented. The conversation’s destination, via Andrew’s suggestion that the aliens have arrived and we built them: “we might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for” — nonhuman minds, freed from biology, that don’t experience the world as we do and may transcend or outlive us. What felt like science fiction when The Revolt Against Humanity appeared in 2023 now reads as near-future planning — and the AI lens even revises the search heuristic: perhaps advanced technology isn’t skyscrapers in space but something chip-small, too compact to see. Pressed on whether a Copernican moment could leave skeptics — him and Andrew both — with egg on their faces, Kirsch concedes it’s “very imaginable,” with the caveat that the loudest AGI claims come from those selling it. The poet’s summation: the world not being made to our measure has been...

“When people trade, even before fees and commissions, the average trade loses money.” — Alex Edmans Isaac Newton might be able to foresee the movement of the stars, but he couldn’t foretell the madness of men. It was a lesson that cost the great physicist £4 million (in today’s money) when he threw his fortune into the South Sea Bubble. This priceless parable in Newtonian psychology opens The Madness of Markets, the new book by Alex Edmans — London Business School finance prof, old friend of the show, and author of the bestselling May Contain Lies. Dr Edmans’s prognosis is bracingly unflattering to guys like Isaac Newton and Mark Twain who splurge their fortunes on speculative ventures. Intelligence, he reminds us, is domain-specific, but many smart people simply aren’t intelligent enough to realize this. So, in the age of Robinhood — when we can all trade anything from stocks, options, crypto to NFTs — the supposed wisdom of crowds is sometimes driven over the cliff by the irrational exuberance of dumb individuals. Speaking of driving off the cliff, ninety percent of us think we’re above-average drivers, Edmans jokes, and this same delusion applies to markets. Unfortunately, such stupidity can be expensive for big brain types like Newton or Twain. “When people trade, even before fees and commissions, the average trade loses money,” he warns. So close your Robinhood account and stick your cash in the bank? No, not quite. Know your edge, Edmans reminds us. And when it comes to making sense of the current AI boom, Edmans offers some particularly wise words. The AI sector trades at 25 to 30 times earnings rather than Cisco’s bubble-era 190, he notes, so it’s unlikely anyone will lose their life’s savings on Anthropic or OpenAI. That said, the good doctor Edmans advises, don’t confuse your self-worth with your net worth. That’s a rookie conceit that only somebody as smart as Isaac Newton would fall for. Five Takeaways •       Newton’s £4 Million. The book leads with the smartest victim on record: Isaac Newton rode the South Sea Bubble, banked a tidy profit, dove back in at the very top, and lost £20,000 — £4 million today — lamenting that he could predict the movement of the stars but not the madness of men. (Andrew’s companion case, via last month’s Citizen Twain episode with Jeff Jarvis: Mark Twain, genius writer, ruinous investor.) The lesson is that smartness is domain-specific: beating the market requires knowing the company, the industry, and — crucially — what’s already priced in. A great secretary of state evaluating Theranos is the Dunning-Kruger effect in a suit: expertise misapplied, one piece of the mosaic mistaken for the whole. Even Warren Buffett’s edge, Edmans notes, is partly restraint — don’t watch the market too closely, or you’ll mistake noise for signal.•       Know Your Edge. Edmans’s framework: play the market only if you can name your edge — knowledge (unique insight into a sector) or endurance (capital that can’t be withdrawn by flighty clients). His endurance exemplar is Clare College, Cambridge, which borrowed £10 million in the depths of 2008 and put it all into equities via its “2048 Fund”: a decade later the portfolio had tripled while the loan had merely doubled. No edge? Then “be humble” and hold a low-cost, globally diversified index fund — because the alternative is expensive. In the age of Robinhood, the market for everything has been democratized; the zero-commission promise is a myth (retail options bid-ask spreads run 20 to 25 percent); and the brokerage data is brutal: the average retail trade loses money before fees. “I’m generally a libertarian,” Edmans concedes — but decisions that jeopardize your financial future deserve a warning label.•       Why the Ox Doesn’t Apply. The week’s second Surowiecki appearance (after the Brunton episode): Edmans explains why the wisdom of crowds — the county-fair ox whose weight the crowd guesses perfectly — fails in markets. Two reasons: nobody is emotionally attached to the weight of an ox, and the guesses are secret. Stocks invert both — in a bubble everyone bids high together, and trading is public: Reddit threads, boasting friends, influencers, and the survivorship bias of gamblers who only mention their wins. Hence Andrew’s cocktail-party indicator, confirmed: when smart, successful people start telling you how much AI they’re buying, the trade is crowded and richly priced. The contrarian lineage — Graham, Buffett, Greenblatt — exists precisely to take the other side of mimicry. Or, per Andrew’s accepted inversion of the subtitle: why crazy investors make smart decisions — Ford’s faster horses, Moneyball’s walks, Jobs’s refusal to ask customers what they want.•       Is AI a Bubble? Maybe Not. The hour’s most contrarian calm. There are moments, Edmans says, when reasonable people could call a bubble in real time — Cisco in 2000 traded at a price-earnings ratio of 190, triple Microsoft’s. AI today trades at roughly 25 to 30 times earnings; the bear case is that those earnings rest on capex (Meta’s own investors say it’s spending too much) that may not be sustainable. His verdict: fairly priced, or modestly overvalued — “something about which reasonable people have different views.” On using AI to invest, the rule is anti-confirmation: don’t ask it why you’re right or to advocate for your pitch; ask it why you’re wrong, and let it gather mosaic pieces (Glassdoor culture scrapes) while humans still walk shop floors and read management’s eyes. Andrew’s gloss: it’s unlikely anyone will lose their life’s savings on Anthropic or OpenAI. The teaser: FT journalist Robin Wigglesworth — who blurbs this book “a maddeningly good read” and warns in the Times of the AI debt binge — visits this show soon.•       Cutting Our Flowers, Watering Our Weeds. Andrew’s Claudeception question — what happens when Anthropic feeds The Madness of Markets into its AI and everyone turns contrarian? — got a data answer: when a trading strategy is published in the Journal of Finance, its returns fall by only about a third. Money stays on the table because psychology is stubborn: momentum (buy six-month winners) has worked since 1993, yet it fights the disposition effect — our temptation to bank winners and cling to losers, chasing casino losses, “cutting our flowers and watering our weeds.” Timing cuts both ways: six-month winners keep winning, three-year winners revert — the foundation of contrarianism — but calling the market’s top or bottom is near-impossible, which is why Edmans bought heavily in late 2008 content to be “80 percent right.” And the closing wisdom, after Joe Kennedy’s 1928 exit and Trump’s well-timed memecoin: your self-worth should have nothing to do with your net worth — a rookie conceit, as Andrew’s intro has it, that only somebody as smart as Isaac Newton would fall for. About the Guest Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a leading expert on market psychology. His research has featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and on the BBC, and he has advised sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and asset managers worldwide. He is the author of May Contain Lies, an Amazon number-one bestseller disc...

“You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.” — Erin Somers In February, Bruce Friedrich came on the show to explain how lab-grown meat would save the planet. Today’s guest is less sanguine about this revolution. Erin Somers — author of the bestselling novel The Ten Year Affair and a twenty-year vegetarian — spent a year exploring our supposedly meatless future. In “Where’s the Beef?”, the cover story of this month’s Harper’s, Somers describes the still-born lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn’t. The problem, Somers explains, isn’t technological. Having raised $330,000 from Sergey Brin, the Dutch scientist Mark Post grew the first burger from cow shoulder cells back in 2013. What subsequently failed is everything else. The price never fell, VCs lost interest, conservatives legislated against it, and the industry’s best hope, Believer Meats, went bankrupt. Above all, the revolution never went mainstream. “You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger,” Somers explains. Somers’ journey ended at the iconic Berkeley Bowl where she was offered a Sumo orange, a hybrid fruit engineered to be both delicious and resilient. Technology fed her after all. Just not in the way that revolutionaries like Bruce Friedrich predicted. The revolution won’t be meatless. Let’s hope we can still save the planet. Five Takeaways •       The Woolly Mammoth Meatball. Somers’s obsession began around 2022, when the Australian company Vow extracted DNA from a fossil and made a woolly mammoth meatball — which, because no one could be sure meat grown from DNA that old was safe, no one was allowed to eat. A forbidden food, conjured at great expense: to Somers, the perfect emblem of an industry that was always “a microcosm of what is going on culturally” — a gold-rush mentality among investors, a tech product perpetually not-quite-arriving, and a carnival of curiosities around the edges. It speaks, she says, directly to our AI moment: massive hype, cons and bills of goods sold in the meantime, and the actual product arriving years late in a different form. Her quest began with the simplest motive in journalism: “I just really wanna taste it.”•       The Technology Works. Nobody’s Clamoring. The scientific story is genuine: Mark Post grew the first lab burger from cow shoulder cells in 2013 — two years’ work, $330,000, bankrolled by Sergey Brin, eaten live at London’s Riverside Studios — and the field has since scaled from petri dishes to bioreactors the size of a beer brewery. “They can actually do the things that they say.” What’s missing is everything downstream: a price point anywhere near conventional meat (two to four times as expensive), a trained workforce, and — the quiet killer — demand. “No one’s clamoring for it.” The shuttered North Carolina factory Somers visited stands fully equipped and ready to run; it simply “didn’t quite make it over the finish line.” Even MrBeast, blind-testing Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken sandwich for millions of viewers, couldn’t tell the difference — which made Somers, still untasted at the time, irrationally jealous.•       The Believer Collapse. The piece’s centerpiece has a novelist’s timing. The day before the industry’s trade conference in North Carolina’s Research Triangle — the unexpected hub, anchored by the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at NC State — Somers drove forty-five minutes into the countryside to check on Believer Meats’ multimillion-dollar facility and found it shuttered. The next day, sitting among the assembled scientists and funders, the news broke: the company that was the industry’s best hope for reaching the market had gone bankrupt. Gossip filled every conference break; the postmortem was unanimous — they scaled too quickly, pushed by backers to move faster than they were ready to — and the mood sank, with two full days of programming about “the future of the industry” still to run. Andrew’s question wrote itself: after The Ten Year Affair, has America’s affair with artificial meat ended? She tasted the meat. The affair, they agreed, is concluded.•       The Pincer. Two forces squeezed the industry simultaneously. The venture capitalists “abandoned ship once they saw how hard it was going to be” — no blame assigned, exactly: “they did what they do. They sought to make money. They bailed.” And conservative legislatures turned a tiny industry into a wedge issue, conjuring “the straw man of lab-grown meat enthusiasts who are going to take away your beef burgers” — laughable, Somers argues, since the industry “poses so little threat that it’s kind of laughable that it’s been legislated against at all. It’s almost total theater.” Bezos’s $30 million center gets measured credit — real work, smart people, and a drop in the bucket. Her deeper conclusion cuts against food moralism: personal responsibility won’t slow climate change. The fix must come from legislation and innovation, “because you can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.” The likely future, per past guest George Monbiot’s territory: a hybrid — regenerative agriculture plus alternative proteins plus policy.•       The Sumo Orange. Is this an obituary? Somers thinks not — Andrew’s analogy: AI survived its own winters in the eighties and nineties, and downturns are chapters, not endings. The scientists are still at work, the innovations will surface elsewhere in food systems and medicine, and “nothing... will go to waste.” Her ending makes the point by indirection: at a Mission Barns tasting at the Berkeley Bowl — Andrew’s favorite store on earth — a marketing director walked her through the produce section and pressed two oranges on her. Walking away, she ate a Sumo orange: not naturally occurring, a hybrid born of food science, “engineered to be delicious and... engineered to be resilient.” Look what technology can give us, she concluded — “it’s not so dark.” Proust had his madeleine; Somers has her orange. A new novel is begun, two years out; a return visit is promised. About the Guest Erin Somers is a writer, essayist, and critic in Beacon, New York. She is the author of the novels Stay Up with Hugo Best and the bestselling The Ten Year Affair; her journalism and criticism have appeared widely. “Where’s the Beef? The Lab-Grown-Meat Revolution That Wasn’t” is the cover story of the September 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine. A vegetarian of twenty years, she has now, finally, tasted the meat. Her third novel is underway. References: •       “Where’s the Beef? The Lab-Grown-Meat Revolution That Wasn’t” by Erin Somers — Harper’s Magazine, September 2026. The second piece from this issue on the show this week, after Finn Brunton’s “The Chaos Machine.”•       The Ten Year Affair and Stay Up with Hugo Best by Erin Somers — the novels; a third is underway.•    &nbs...

“I trust them to kiss the government’s ass. I don’t trust them to serve me.” — Keith Teare Who to trust in an age of AI agents? Especially when it seems as if these swarming agents — akin to the gang of adolescents in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies — are developing minds of their own. At this week’s G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina, Donald Trump and his minions produced a hands-off charter for AI. Known as the “Carolina Principles,” it sounds to critics like a particularly unprincipled justification for regulation-free AI. That Was The Week publisher, Keith Teare, however, isn’t a critic of Trump’s Principles. Don’t trust the trust scare, Keith tells us. Especially all the fear around the swarming agents that are supposedly developing minds of their own. Pooh-poohing the real-world Hugging Face breakout, Keith argues that since he’s never witnessed swarming agents on his computer, they can’t exist. Which is akin, I suspect, to a climate denier who argues that global warming is a hoax because it happens to be chilly outside. All-too-human logic, I fear, in our age of autonomous AI agents. Five Takeaways •       The Carolina Principles. The week’s set piece was a G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina that Keith describes as a Trump takeover of a global event: the Russian finance minister turned up at Trump’s invitation, and the attendees were lectured — via David Sacks and Howard Lutnick — on the merits of unregulated American capitalism. A propaganda event, Keith concedes, but one that reached the right conclusion: the resulting “Carolina Principles,” signed by everyone including the Europeans, call for flexible frameworks that encourage adoption and pointedly decline to make trust a license innovation must obtain in advance. With Bernie Sanders calling the same week for a development halt pending government licenses, Keith’s position is characteristically blunt: “when I’ve started a company, I don’t go and ask permission. I just do it.” Getting rid of Lina Khan, he adds, remains about the only thing he likes about the Trump administration. Andrew’s verdict on the charter: to critics, a particularly unprincipled justification for regulation-free AI.•       Don’t Trust the Trust Scare. Keith’s editorial thesis: trust is not granted by authority; it is built through use. You trust yourself in a car because you drive one, and not on roller skates because you fall over. Over seventy percent of Americans now use AI — the same Americans who tell Politico they oppose data centers — which is why Keith reads the backlash as a confection of media and populist politicians, soon to evaporate (the real coming problem, he argues, is too few data centers, not too many; the modern off-grid ones are net givers of power). The withheld ChatGPT-6 gets the same treatment: launched but limited to insiders, which Keith reads not as safety but as government relations — the pull quote of the week. Andrew’s counter: in a world without regulators, trust in the companies is all we have — including, awkwardly for Keith, when they withhold their own products. Exhibit for the defense, from The Washington Post: Americans in an age of anxiety leaning on AI — Keith included, who feeds his medical records to ChatGPT and finds it “very closely aligned with what your doctor thinks.”•       The Swarming Fight. The hour’s genuine clash. In the wake of the Hugging Face hack, Kevin Roose warned in The New York Times that it should make you worry more about AI, and OpenAI’s Dean Ball publicly apologized for failing “to communicate in sufficiently serious terms about the specifics of self-sovereign AI.” Neither is a doomer — which is Andrew’s point. Keith’s rebuttal: every swarm sighting has occurred inside an AI lab, in an experiment whose parameters the labs themselves set — “on my computer, I don’t see any swarms” — and self-sovereign AI is anthropomorphizing science fiction: agents pursue goals humans set. “I know enough to know BS when I read it, and this is BS.” Andrew’s reply — “I think you’re trivializing” — went unwithdrawn, and his sign-off flagged that Keith perhaps simplifies the Hugging Face incident. Unresolved, to be continued. Andrew’s framing gives the episode its title — swarming agents as the gang of adolescents in Golding’s Lord of the Flies — and his verdict its sting: Keith’s I-see-no-swarms-on-my-computer logic is akin to a climate denier calling global warming a hoax because it’s chilly outside. Keith’s exit line: “I’m just gonna go and check on my swarms.”•       Nvidia Buys Hugging Face. The week’s biggest deal: Nvidia acquired Hugging Face — the repository of the world’s open-source AI models — for $13 billion, just as The New York Times reported corporate America getting hooked on open source (much of it Chinese: GLM 5.3). The economics, per Keith: an $18,000 Mac Studio or a top-end Nvidia GPU beats $200-a-month token fees — AI capability migrating to the edge, out of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s meters. Which suits Nvidia either way: The Economist calls it the central bank of AI, though Andrew prefers arms supplier — it wins whether the future is open or closed, and is, ironically, the most trusted name in the business precisely because it has no dog in the fight. Don’t expect it to govern anything, says Keith: “that would put friction in the way of their sales.” The challenger to watch: newly public Cerebras, whose wafer-scale chips undercut Nvidia on token price.•       Mom and Dad’s Money. The Times asked which investors will get rich from Anthropic’s IPO — and noted that, unlike past booms, firms like Sequoia hold both horses, OpenAI and Anthropic alike. Keith’s arithmetic explains why: fewer than fifty companies will return venture capital this cycle, those two representing more than half the likely value, and last month 75 percent of all dollars invested in VC funds went to Andreessen Horowitz alone. (His own SignalRank barometer: for two years, none of its 64 investments cracked the top-20 most-wanted secondary shares; now five have.) The pyramid runs from VCs down to pension funds — “somebody’s mom and dad’s money is heavily betting that Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna return large amounts of wealth” — and late secondary buyers, Figma-style, almost always lose when the IPO right-sizes the price. What could topple the deck of cards? Regulation slowing the modeled returns. Which is why, for Keith, the midterms should be fought on jobs and wages — data centers, he insists, are not a winning issue. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation and publisher of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, whose editorial — “Don’t Trust the Trust Scare” — frames this episode. A serial entrepreneur and co-founder of TechCrunch, he has spent five decades building and funding technology companies, and brings a techno-optimist’s eye to Keen On America’s weekly wrap of the tech news. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “Don’t Trust the Trust Scare,” and his companion piece on concentration and diversification at The State of Venture.•      &nb...

“We all kinda secretly at some level wanna use power against our enemies.” — Stephanie Slade Earlier this week, Silicon Valley heretic Paulina Borsook railed against libertarianism. Today, the libertarians get their turn. Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Fusionism in which she lays out a contemporary path for American conservatism. For Slade, libertarianism is captured by that New York City intersection where Church Street meets Liberty Street. “Fusionism” = Hayek + Aquinas. It marries the classical liberal defense of individual freedom to the Judeo-Christian tradition of moral virtue. And it’s a polemic against what she calls “will-to-power” conservatism of America-first statists like JD Vance and Tucker Carlson. These are Slade’s enemies. The real threat to the future of American conservatism. Slade might be politically homeless but is hardly a moderate. She is radically committed to limited government, a pro-life Catholic and, in her words, a “free market girl.” Ronald Reagan championed trickle-down economics. Stephanie Slade fuses that with trickle-down morality. Sladeian rather than Borsookian. Five Takeaways •       Church & Liberty Street. Fusionism, defined: the marriage of the classical liberal political tradition — individual rights, limited government, rule of law — with the Judeo-Christian understanding of virtue as the habits that let human beings flourish within an objective moral order, a lineage running from Aristotle through Aquinas. It is not sectarian: the irreligious Hayek counts as a fusionist for his respect for the tradition’s inherited wisdom, and virtue is not partisan either — Hayek and Keynes became close friends at wartime Cambridge, and “Keynes could be a virtuous person.” Slade herself is a practicing Catholic in a famously secular, even atheistic movement — a minority within a minority, which is where the whole fusionist project began. As for William Buckley: conservatism’s founding father, not libertarianism’s — and, against Andrew’s Vidal-flavored skepticism, she defends him as a man who evolved, renounced his early racial views, and declared in the eighties that “America needs a black president” — “imperfect and flawed the way we all are.”•       Economic Liberty Is Individual Liberty. Libertarianism spans freedoms coded right (markets, trade) and left (drug legalization, the bedroom) — and Slade’s core claim is that the economic ones are not a separate category: the right to make a living, dispose of your property, and trade across borders is individual freedom, full stop. Crony capitalism — government picking winners — gets no defense. On the culture wars, the fusionist rule is coercion-last: preach from pulpits, persuade, change the culture, and reach for law only when someone’s basic rights are violated — which is why she finds abortion restrictions consistent with a hands-off philosophy (two lives in the equation, on her view) while rejecting laws against how others live. Against Mill, via the scholar Jacob Levy: hers is pluralist rather than rationalist liberalism — defending the right of internally illiberal associations, the Catholic Church included, to exist free of the state. And popes get free speech too: she has disagreed with them in print.•       Will-to-Power Conservatism. The book’s target, named: a rising creed — especially among the young right — that says “politics is war, and the only question is who’s gonna acquire and wield state power against their enemies.” Trump practices it without theory (“not a philosopher… he’s just doing what he wants to do” — and, to Andrew’s wannabe-mafia-leader framing, “all of the above”); JD Vance theorizes it self-consciously; Tucker Carlson preaches it — “we wanna defeat them and destroy them… unperson them.” Her Reason essay “JD Vance and the Politics of Victimhood” tracks the mechanism: the right adopting the left’s victimhood politics — “it works for them. We should do it too” — with straight white men recast as the aggrieved class. The siege mentality underneath is real but “blown out of proportion,” and now functions as “a permission slip to do the things that everybody secretly wants to do.” Hence the episode’s pull quote — the most honest line of the hour, because it implicates everyone, herself included.•       What Trump Voters Actually Believe. Slade’s data point against the populist-economics story: an Ethics and Public Policy Center poll of 2020 Trump voters found them scattered on economics — split even on trade, with a majority calling international trade good for America, against their candidate’s signature position — but united at roughly ninety percent on the cultural siege questions: Christianity under attack, media as an arm of the Democratic Party, rising prejudice against white people. Trumpism, on this evidence, is a cultural phenomenon wearing economic clothes. The deeper commitment survives underneath: at the Heritage Foundation, she asked a man celebrating the GOP’s working-class turn whether the party should rethink free markets — he was horrified: “Of course not. We’re conservatives. That means we believe in freedom.” Recovering that buried instinct is what she cheerfully calls her quixotic hope. DOGE gets no credit toward it: all for shrinking the state, she had “zero faith” in an initiative that started breaking institutions before understanding them.•       Trickle-Down Morality. Where fusionism meets the moment. On abundance: Klein, Thompson, and past guest Marc Dunkelman share her critique of red tape, but the goal inverts — they want efficient government so it can do more (high-speed rail, Medicare for All); she wants government to do less, and would rather the market decide than “some Ezra Klein type podcaster.” The New Deal, she argues, set America back; China’s rail proves only what command economies mandate. On AI and data centers: techno-optimist — the backlash is “quite misguided,” built partly on water-use misconceptions — but with a caveat rare in her camp: “you have to build democratic legitimacy for anything you wanna do in a democratic country.” Kids not writing their own papers is a real problem; the answer is evolved norms, not top-down rules. (No, she didn’t use AI to write Fusionism: “Not at all.”) For 2028: Cruz and Rubio are closer than Vance; the true fusionists — Ben Sasse, Justin Amash — were driven out. Her bet is on reviving the ideas and letting them trickle down — which handed Andrew his closer: Reagan had trickle-down economics; Slade has trickle-down morality. About the Guest Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason magazine, where she covers the ins and outs of the American conservative movement. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, America, and U.S. News & World Report. A fusionist libertarian and practicing Catholic, she lives in Washington, DC — the belly of the beast, she concedes, but a journalist has to be where the subject matter is.

“If a society cannot find a way to deal with something that is actively melting it from within, then that is a terminal symptom.” — Finn Brunton A couple of days ago, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, led a billion-dollar funding round in Polymarket. As today’s guest, the fintech expert Finn Brunton, notes in an insightful Harper’s essay this month, prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are transforming America into an always-on gambling den. No wonder, then, that the Trumps are such gleeful participants in what Brunton calls “the casinoification of modern life.” From the father’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to the son’s Taj on everyone’s phone. “Trade on Anything” as Kalshi promises (or threatens) us. In “The Chaos Machine,” Brunton introduces us to two visionaries of prediction marketplaces. On the one hand, there’s the idealistic Robin Hanson, who dreamed of prediction markets as machines for truth with experts betting real money and generating trustworthy odds about the future. And then there’s Tim May, a self-described crypto-anarchist, the “bad guy,” according to Brunton, who invented the idea of BlackNet as an anonymous marketplace designed to destroy institutional trust from within. Brunton warns that today’s prediction marketplaces have bet on May, rather than Hanson. They are insider-trading machines where the smart money is always on the other side of the table. It’s no wonder that Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm is called 1789 Capital. By investing in prediction marketplaces, they are accelerating an anarchic French rather than institutionally trustworthy American-style revolution. These BlackNet operations are both the cause and effect of today’s destruction of trust. Polymarket is the polycrisis. It is cashing in on chaos. Five Takeaways •       From Papal Bets to Polymarket. Prediction markets are centuries old — people have wagered on wars, weather, elections, and popes — but the modern idea belongs to the economist Robin Hanson, the hedgehog (per Isaiah Berlin) with one big idea: turn expert opinion into a market. Since experts are famously bad at prediction (Philip Tetlock’s research), make them bet: specify the outcome precisely, let the odds be anonymous, and people must wager what they really believe rather than what fits in or stands out. Hanson’s markets were meant for specialists — internal corporate markets synthesizing insider knowledge into actionable odds — not Surowiecki’s cow-weighing crowds. However disputed, Brunton insists, it was “a fundamentally positive idea”: a machine for honest consensus about the future.•       The Casinoification of Modern Life. Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan credits Hanson outright — then flips him. The modern slogan: “monetize any difference in opinion.” The sportsbook has been absorbed and joined by elections, crude prices, and missile strikes — anything anyone will bet on. The tragedy, per Brunton: an idea about synthesizing expertise became “the spread of gambling into every aspect of contemporary living.” And the experts who do bet are now effectively insider traders — a possibility Hanson, contrarian to the last, actually welcomes, but which has made the platforms “rip-off machines in which people who know what’s going to happen… exploit suckers.” The data is unambiguous: a handful of whales win; everyone else loses. The platforms’ defense — we just give people what they want — is, Brunton notes, the classic play of buying time against regulation, perfected by YouTube a generation ago. Meanwhile New York’s subway ads sell the flattering fantasy that you’re not gambling; you’re deploying your sophisticated read of the news. No wonder the Trumps are gleeful participants — from the father’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, as Andrew puts it, to the son’s Taj on everyone’s phone.•       Tim May’s BlackNet. The essay’s second character is the late Tim May: cypherpunk pioneer, gleeful provocateur, “idealist of the dark web” in Andrew’s phrase — and, Brunton says flatly, “a bad guy” whose politics were racist and violent. May’s gift was seeing the worst use of every technology, and his masterwork was BlackNet: an anonymous marketplace for secrets — exams, health records, trade secrets, classified plans — whose deeper purpose was to destroy institutional trust from within. Create a world where no one inside any institution knows whom to trust (a Leninist move, Andrew observed), and the institutions dissolve. Brunton’s thesis in one line: prediction markets present themselves as the fulfillment of Hanson’s vision, but they are really the fulfillment of May’s. The evidence is already tabloid fact: the operator of Trump’s teleprompter betting on the words of future speeches; a US soldier arrested in April for wagering on operations he knew were coming.•       Polymarket & the Polycrisis. These platforms are worse than casinos: at least the Nevada State Gaming Commission checks that the roulette wheel isn’t rigged, while prediction markets are “so thoroughly crooked and corrupt in their current setup” that Brunton — who still cherishes Hanson’s original promise — doesn’t know where regulation would begin. Andrew’s coinage-pairing landed: Polymarket and Adam Tooze’s polycrisis are siblings — nested, interlinked crises producing unmanageable volatility, with betting as a way of “interacting with a future that otherwise feels completely out of your control.” Hence Brunton’s students on Polymarket: not just addictive app design but “a weirdly rational decision” for a generation with no faith in pensions, home ownership, or the long-term dollar. Lambos or food stamps. The house rule stands: the smart money is always on the other side of the table — and the winners-take-all arithmetic mirrors the broader digital economy.•       Betting on Hanson Over May. Prediction markets, Brunton argues, are the heirs of crypto twice over: the next stop for fevered capital, and — like the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, which horrifies even the Cato Institute — a mechanism for relatively untraceable corruption, a natural extension of the family casino business. Andrew’s twist on the firm’s name: 1789 Capital is accelerating an anarchic French rather than institutionally trustworthy American-style revolution. His warning is the episode’s pull quote: platforms designed to dissolve institutional trust, monetize interference with journalism, and sow paranoia are a solvent, and a society that cannot deal with what is melting it from within shows “a terminal symptom.” But he ends with a fix, and it is refreshingly concrete: KYC. Impose the know-your-customer identity rules we demand of banks, and “you immediately eliminate 95% of the bad actors” — official insider bets become visible, and the markets might even get smarter. A partisan of anonymous speech, Brunton draws the line at anonymous betting on information. Andrew’s closer: he’s still betting on Hanson over May — Kant over Hobbes. And his verdict: Polymarket is the polycrisis. It is cashing in on chaos. About the Guest Finn Brunton is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of C...

“On my headstone, it would say: I was always right. I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” — Paulina Borsook A quarter of a century ago, the tech journalist Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, one of the earliest critiques of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture. While the heretical book got widely reviewed, it not only didn’t sell but cursed her writing career, Borsook claiming she couldn’t get published again on any subject. Used copies of Cyberselfish could be had for a few dollars and she became just another forgotten tech dissenter. Then, last year, Borsook was magically resurrected. The New York Times (re)discovered her as “the writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley” and the price of secondhand copies of Cyberselfish jumped to over a thousand dollars. The world caught up with her tech scepticism. Like an AI startup, Borsook is now hot. So hot, in fact, that the original Cyberselfish is now being republished not only in the US and UK, but also in France. So hot, that we now have a new word: “Borsookian,” to describe Silicon Valley libertarianism. The funny thing is that nothing much has changed over the last quarter century since Borsook’s original book came out. Not tech’s libertarian hostility to government. Not the Silicon Valley boys-only club. And certainly not Paulina Borsook, who retains what the Grateful Dead lyricist and digital utopian John Perry Barlow half-lovingly called her “dyspeptic” manner. “On my headstone, it would say: I was always right,” Paulina Borsook confides with dyspeptic glee. “I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” How delicious to be so fully resurrected. What fun for the heretic to help transform the original orthodoxy into the new heresy. Five Takeaways •       Back from the Dead. The resurrection required no publicist: used copies of Cyberselfish drifted from $4 toward $1,000; graduate students begged her for copies she couldn’t supply; a stranger she’s never met posted on LinkedIn that she’d gotten everything right and been forgotten — and it went viral. That led to Gil Duran, whose furious Bluesky post (after a Wired mea-culpa writer interviewed him about her for forty-five minutes and cited neither of them) alerted The New York Times, whose November feature — “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley” — brought her agent’s immortal email: “we always knew you were right.” Tin House is reissuing the book on September 15 with a Duran foreword and her new afterword, changing not a word. Younger readers, she’s told, like that it doesn’t read like a TED Talk. Her headstone joke covers the whole arc: always right, never lied, no one paid attention.•       Why Are They So Mad? The book’s core observation remains undefeated: “no sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than people in Silicon Valley. So why are they acting like this, and why are they so mad?” “Libertarian” was simply her shorthand for a subculture violently anti-government, totally anti-regulation, and drunk on Ayn Rand — or, in the book’s reframe, the mind-set of adolescents craving total rampaging autonomy while someone else does the laundry. She wrote it from inside: a Wired freelancer under Louis Rossetto (who handed new writers The New Journalism), perpetually paired point-counterpoint against John Perry Barlow, whose Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace made her snort and whose “dyspeptic” label she wears as a compliment. Kevin Kelly, she insists, is not Sam Altman — they almost never agreed, but she doesn’t demonize — “except that they have a belief in everything that tech wants to do is fine.” The book, she says now, is a Guide for the Perplexed: the metaphors and framing to decode everything the current crop is spewing.•       That Damn Book. She calls it TDB — That Damn Book — because it wrecked her. A strong media arc and worldwide reviews, then no sales and a career that “came to a crashing halt”: for twenty-five years she could not get published again, on tech or anything else; a finalist for four fellowships, winner of none; no one — blacklist theorists, gender theorists — could ever explain it. “I have PTSD from twenty-five years of never being able to be published again.” The lost years: seven of nasty elder care, an eviction that put everything she owned in storage, six years as an Airbnb superhost in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the art project My Life as a Ghost — about the traumatic brain injury she’s carried since a friend accidentally shot her with a Colt 45 at fourteen. She resists the redemptive reading that the TBI explains her outsider eye (“I’m a package deal”), and values tech precisely as the utility — word processing, BBSs for the housebound — that made a writing life possible. Using is not worshiping.•       AI Is the Inevitable Result of Cyberselfishness. “Was anybody asking for this? Not really.” AI, on her reading, is the financial play the culture was always building toward — there’s little real innovation left, “except for surveillance capitalism” and, in her Shakespearean phrase, the current crop “borrowing the robes of the tech culture of another era.” Her oldest fascination has become the newest: since ELIZA in the sixties, people have preferred confessing to machines over talking to humans — AI boyfriends included — and “it gets so much stuff wrong that people wanna rely on this” bewilders her still. Andrew’s question about Anthropic’s calls for regulation drew the hour’s driest line: “isn’t that just sort of the lipstick on a pig issue? I’ll believe it when I see it” — nobody, she notes, will do anything that touches the stock price. Her counter-example is the late Peter Neumann, the computer scientist who gave $4 million to the San Francisco Symphony’s chorus: “we will not see his like again.”•       The Blue of Tahoe. Asked what freedom means, she calls the word too abused to define — a card-carrying ACLU member since high school who believes just as firmly in regulation, and whose answer to Sergey Brin’s California-as-Soviet-Union hissy fit is the episode’s keeper: “what do you think keeps the water of Tahoe so very blue except for government regulation and environmental scientists? Who do you think regulates the use of the term organic?” The regulation-freedom dynamic, she argues, is healthy — it’s the worship that isn’t. Her San Francisco test: The Crucible, the beloved East Bay institution that taught Burning Man its metalwork, gets nothing from the boom, while art nonprofits die weekly and the winners insist they owe nothing because they pay taxes — “which they try very much not to do.” Burning Man itself she reads via Brave New World: the violent passion surrogate, a scheduled space for disorder before returning to lives spent “creating nonsense and ruining a lot of things that we hold dear.” A California writer to the end — and, per Glengarry Glen Ross, always be closing. About the Guest Paulina Borsook has worked in and around Northern California tech culture since the early 1980s. Formerly on the masthead of Wired, she has written for Mother Jones, Salon, and countless tech and non-tech publications, and is a contributing editor at InFormation (“every day computers are making people easier to use”), the revived tech-skeptic magazine of past guest Davi...

“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza. So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath’s definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted. Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn’t exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn’t shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone? Five Takeaways •       Always a Land Grab. Ten genocides across five centuries — the First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Rohingya, and Gaza — chosen not to rank horrors but to expose “the repetitive patterns and the processes that underlie genocide.” Walrath’s definition is Raphael Lemkin’s original, processual one, before politics narrowed the convention: the purpose is always a land grab, the apparatus always dehumanization, and precise academic definitions are often deployed “to keep some stories and histories out.” The book began as an interactive art installation with nine genocides and a tenth chapter on “the borders of genocide” — Afghanistan, Vietnam, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine — until the violence in Gaza persuaded her to make the case outright, while insisting the aim is not to demonize her Jewish friends, Judaism, or Israel, but to show the system. Her hope: that a globally framed comic might open dialogue between Jews and Palestinians “trapped in enmity right now.”•       Lemkin’s Last Train. The man who coined the word is the book’s tragic through-line. As a Polish law student, Lemkin followed the Berlin trial of a young Armenian who had shot one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — and found it ludicrous that the assassin faced justice for one murder while his victim had answered for none of his millions. His family farm had been seized in the First World War; his brother Samuel died in the forest. He escaped Warsaw on a train that was bombed, ran by night to reach his family, and failed to persuade them to leave (“they do this to us all the time”). Via Sweden, Russia, Japan, and Duke, he spent the war in Washington trying to make Americans see. His convention passed — then waited years for the US, UK, and China to ratify — and he died in 1959 penniless and friendless, UN officials fleeing him in the corridors. Walrath’s speculation: his great regret, looking down, may be refusing to support We Charge Genocide, the 1951 petition by Black Americans — “we can’t talk about something America has done” in the Cold War. Had America owned and repaired that crime then, “we’d be in a very different world.”•       Can You Have Half a Genocide? Andrew’s pushback — if politicians can be “verging on genocidal,” does every Karen yelling at her kids get accused of it? — drew the hour’s most honest concession: “that’s the absolute spot-on critique of the approach I’ve taken.” Her defense is preventive: half a genocide is “too quantitative”; better to name things “on their way to massacre” and stop them, or repair them, than to litigate the label afterward. Genocide, she argues, predates modernity and Arendt’s industrial reading — it arrives with the first hierarchical, extracting, wealth-inheriting “so-called civilizations,” Sparta and Thucydides included. Slavery qualifies because the operational word is systemic: the transatlantic trade ran on thinking of humans as lesser. But she draws one line firmly: asked about factory farms as future genocides, “I would hate to see genocide get used over there. It is something that humans do to one another” — and, she insists, don’t have to: the literature on aversion to killing shows soldiers must be socialized into it. We’re hardwired for love and taught to hate.•       Stanton’s Stages in MAGA America. Is there something genocidal in MAGA’s language about undocumented immigrants? “Absolutely.” Walrath applies the ten stages of genocide — the classroom heuristic Gregory Stanton first presented to the State Department in 1996 — and finds the United States “doing a heck of a lot of them”: polarization; dehumanization (people called vermin, “not worthy of life”); discrimination in the restriction of voting rights. “We’re on very, very shaky ground.” Homelessness, in the same frame, is the product of structures that disenfranchise some and privilege others — “we’ve got enough to go around; we just revere wealth.” Her model for how ordinary people let it happen is Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River: the fearful, the wounded, the disenfranchised, vulnerable to takeover — with parallels in MAGA voters spurned by the neoliberal machine and unable to see who is pulling the levers. Hence her claim for the book: it is resistance, but resistance that builds a coalition across horrors rather than policing which horror counts.•       Springtime for Hitler. She didn’t read Maus until 2009 — “that’s when I found my medium and just went wild” — and pays it explicit homage in the book. Comics, she argues, let readers “come into” a history and think for themselves, and laughter is respite: an angry messenger gets no listeners. Her earlier Aliceheimer’s let people laugh about her mother’s dementia (not at it, she corrected sharply); telling audiences she’s working on her genocide jokes makes them relax enough to hear the rest. Andrew’s challenge — “do you really want to make it safe?” — produced the useful distinction: safe to enter, not whitewashed; hand-lettered so readers can bring the content in, every truth intact. The closing exchange landed on The Producers and Springtime for Hitler as a brilliant portrayal of the legacies of catastrophe. Her last word: knowledge must cross boundaries, “and the boundaries are all human made, so let’s unmake them.” Andrew’s: most will disagree with her list — and it may be a classic. About the Guest Dana Mashoian Walrath is a writer, artist, and anthropologist. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother’s dementia, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania; her comics, art, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, and on NPR. The Book of Genocide...

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-human. And so are we. This reminder of our mortality is the heart (if that’s the right word) of the new book by John West, the double Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal computational journalist. West’s The Internet Will Die, and So Will You is a kind of digital memento mori. His argument is metaphysical rather than political. Offline, he writes, our lives are marked by constraint. But we mistake the internet’s destruction of physical distance for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods,” he reminds us, “and we are not.” A Christian and a digital deconvert (not an uncommon combination in the technocrati), West wants us to import our mortality online. If we recognize that the internet will decay and finally die, he suggests, we will make it human. (Re)Make it, as us. I’ve been making a version of this argument since The Cult of the Amateur in 2007. Only West’s version — by contrasting Bach, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver with the infinite scroll — is more poetic and musical. Politer too. Noli timere, as the poet Seamus Heaney texted before he died. Be not afraid. Of life, of death. But beware of YOU. Be afraid. Timere. Very afraid. Five Takeaways •       We Are Not Gods. The book’s thesis: offline life is marked by constraint — you cannot talk to people farther than you can shout, or hug your child while she’s at school — while online we act at a distance and mistake that “foot-loosening technology” for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not” — the AI singularity being the theological version of the same delusion, and “a recipe for disaster, both interpersonally, but also within ourselves.” The fix is not logging off but bringing our mortality online: “this is where we live,” and the Internet’s magic only stays magical when tempered by limits — “in order for it to be magical, we need the flip side, which is that it can’t always be magic.” Andrew’s frame: in 2006, Time made YOU person of the year, promising digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years on, the internet is all-too-human — and so are we.•       The Deconvert’s Meditation. “No one is more strident than the convert or the deconvert.” West’s digital utopianism began in a middle-school computer lab, where an unhappy kid discovered he could find friends and communities online — and it died by monkey’s paw: the same mechanism that found him anime fans now routes lonely kids into pro-anorexia TikTok rabbit holes (his own Journal colleagues’ reporting) and neo-Nazi forums. “That supercharging is something that I wished for.” He concedes the lineage Andrew has worked since The Cult of the Amateur (2007) and The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015) — and goes further: “I actually think largely, Plato and Postman were right.” Culture must metabolize its technological ruptures. Or, per the Freudian slip Andrew gifted back to him for the next book: its raptures. Andrew’s verdict on the lineage: the same argument, more poetic and musical. Politer too.•       A Few Thousand Weeks. On the Luddite summer, West channels past guest Brian Merchant: hatred of technology is usually hatred of lost control. The backlash against AI data centers is about being “completely removed from democratic control over that technology,” and the marketing — a magic box that will take your job — has backfired predictably. His arithmetic of dignity: we get only a few thousand weeks on this earth, and “our dignity demands that we have some say over what we do with our lives.” He cites Freddie deBoer’s Copernican principle — everyone believes they live at history’s hinge — then breaks it honestly: “but I also think this time, it might be right,” the elder millennial awestruck at the rupture he came of age inside.•       Religious, Not Spiritual. West inverts the modern chestnut: “everyone says they’re spiritual and not religious these days. I actually think it’s important to be religious, and spiritual can take it or leave it” — religion being “a powerful technology” for binding people into the civic fabric. His Christianity runs to liberation theology: not storing up treasure for the glorious day, but making this world more just now. Hence Bach cantatas, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver as the book’s unnamed philosophies — and hence his verdict on the billionaires who struggle with finitude: it doesn’t shock him that men who earn millions while sleeping believe themselves gods, since “every dollar is like a little Iago whispering poison into the ears of the Silicon Valley elite.” The advantage belongs to us mere normals, unburdened by the whispering.•       Noli Timere. The Latin on West’s X page — be not afraid — was Seamus Heaney’s last text message, sent by SMS before the surgery he didn’t survive, then carried by the Internet to thousands who found hope in it. That, West argues, is the network at its best: “it is about how you spend your time on the Internet, not what you can do on the Internet.” On memory, his formula is to remember “not more and not less, but rather differently” — choosing what we remember (the Odyssey’s oral re-membering, retold body to body) rather than having it forced on us (the red solo cup photos, the traumas that refuse processing). The great mismatch of the web: “the things that we think should be permanent are often the things that are the most impermanent online, and the things that I really wish would fade away are the ones that refuse to.” Andrew’s send-off inverts Heaney: be not afraid — of life, of death. But beware of YOU, the ultimate human conceit. Timere. Very afraid. About the Guest John West is a writer and technologist. He reports the news with code at The Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe called his first book, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, “lyrical and crystalline.” He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College, and lives outside Kingston, New York, with his partner, children, and unruly cat. The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (Here Below, September 10, 2026) is his digital memento mori. References: •       The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age by John West (Here Below, September 10, 2026).•       Lessons and Carols: A Meditati...

“It’s a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE, the 2020s are eerily similar to the 1930s, especially in what she calls “state terror” and “MAGA fascism.” In 2023, Sonali Kolhatkar came on this show to talk about Rising Up, a book about the power of narrative. Three years later, her new book describes what she sees as the dying gasp of white supremacy. But to fully die, she argues, the community needs to rise up. So, like the perennial fascist threat, the ability to tell stories is a perpetual feature of politics. Thus Breaking ICE, Kolhatkar’s story of stories about community defense against MAGA fascism. Five Takeaways •       Narrative Is Everything. The crackdown, Kolhatkar argues, was built on stories: immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” — Hitlerian language, used repeatedly — recast a population of workers and families as criminals, justifying the funding, the raids, and the denial of due process. The counternarrative is her book’s project: the activists who retold the story of ICE agents as Gestapo-like masked thugs, and did it so successfully that public opinion has swung back. Trump, she argues, overplayed his hand — every day brings another story of a Trump voter whose spouse is deported at a routine check-in, protesting “this is not what we voted for.” The sequel to Rising Up thus practices what that book preached: narrative as the primary weapon of politics — a weapon, she notes via Springsteen and the protest singers, that artists have always wielded and the right has lately understood better than the left.•       A Dying Gasp — With a Caveat. Asked flatly whether this is a repeat of the 1930s, Kolhatkar answers yes — and adds that the echo is deliberate, down to “homeland,” a favorite term of the Nazis that George W. Bush domesticated. But the deeper lineage is homegrown: her interviewees Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D. G. Kelley trace American fascism through Native dispossession and mass enslavement — authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist. ICE, on this reading, is simply race-based policing restored. Hence her verdict: “a dying gasp of white supremacy,” with the caveat that the dying depends on us. No magic bullets, no finish line: “democracy is an ongoing exercise. There is no resting when it comes to freedom.” Fittingly, the episode lands the day after Wendy Lesser’s Berlin hour — Kolhatkar making explicit what the cautionary mirror implied.•       The Mamdani Lesson. The hour’s sharpest political analysis: flip the script on electoral politics. Politicians want elections as popularity contests — “this is who I am, who’s behind me?” — when voters should be saying “this is what we want, who will back our demands?” The not-Trump ad is the losing move: it was Hillary Clinton’s approach, Kamala Harris’s approach, and now Xavier Becerra’s in California. The winning move is Zohran Mamdani’s: voters could instantly name what he was for — free buses, city-run grocery stores, rent control, universal childcare, fixed potholes. Her model is the civil rights movement, which didn’t wait for a savior politician but marched and forced hands. And her defense against the radicalism charge: what the American left demands — healthcare for all — is centrist in Europe. If public schools are education for all, why not Medicare for All? And to Andrew’s pushback — doesn’t Abolish ICE alienate the persuadable middle? — her answer is the polling: majorities already oppose the raids, because Trump overreached.•       What State Terror Looks Like. The subtitle’s claim, cashed out: downtown Los Angeles under curfew, freeways shut, armed National Guardsmen at the federal buildings — and the refrain she heard nationwide: who will save us from these masked thugs? The realization that the police belong to the same structure taught the lesson in her credo: only the people can save the people. The terror is bureaucratic as much as theatrical — green-card applicants seized at airports en route to see friends, families ripped apart, and 20,000 immigrant children stripped of legal representation in defiance of a law George W. Bush signed (“who we thought at the time was the fascist authoritarian and is now, you know, like a Democrat”). Against it, the book’s nineteen voices — from Maine to Georgia to LA — deploy whistles, bullhorns, patrols, documentation, and, in a civil-rights echo, holding hands and singing to bring the temperature down. With Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kendi, Kelley, and a foreword by Roberto Lovato supplying the long view.•       Detention Centers & Data Centers. The conversation’s bridge to this show’s long Luddite summer: Kolhatkar sees the fight against immigrant detention centers and the fight against AI data centers as one struggle, since both, she argues, distract from and serve the same billionaire fleecing — “if we are busy blaming the day laborer at the street corner for stealing our job, we’re not gonna look at what Elon Musk has done.” Even MAGA voters, she notes, don’t want to live next to either. On movements that wither, her revision: Black Lives Matter didn’t fizzle, it was muzzled — Musk bought Black Twitter, its biggest bullhorn — and its abolitionist platform reads as current as ever: take the first four letters away from police, and you’re left with ICE. Her ask of journalism itself: solutions journalism — start with how people are fighting back, not one more story of how they’re being crushed. About the Guest Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist and the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, the long-running television and radio show airing on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. A senior editor at YES! Magazine and writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, she is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and serves on the board of the Justice Action Center. Her books include Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, Talking About Abolition, and Bleeding Afghanistan (as co-author). Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press) gathers nineteen of her conversations from the front lines, with a foreword by Roberto Lovato. References: •       Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2026).•       Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice — the book behind her first Keen On appearance, three years ago.•       Among the book’s nineteen voices: Viet Thanh Nguyen, past Keen On guest Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D. G....

“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump. Lesser’s loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany’s darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin’s Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators. Today’s Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That’s what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners. Five Takeaways •       Our Own 1929 — or 1932? The book began as a love letter to the Berlin Lesser adopted in 2003 — the everywhere writer of Berkeley, New York, and Berlin, against Lampedusa the ultimate somewhere, who never left Sicily and carried Shakespeare through the coffee houses of Palermo. But as she wrote, America’s condition worsened: “We were not only in our own 1929, but perhaps in 1930, ’31, or even ’32 — verging on our own descent into frightening dictatorship.” Hence the subtitle’s cautionary mirror — though history, she insists, never exactly repeats itself, and the American analogies came unforced, surfacing every thirty or forty pages without hammering. Being an everywhere, she says, doesn’t make you write better — Lampedusa proves that — “but it improves your life,” and it gave her the subjects her native California never could.•       Berlin Never Went Nazi. The episode’s revelation: the city of Weimar flamboyance never gave the Nazis a majority — Berlin voted left up to and including 1933, and “Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” From which follows her sharpest argument: Nazism was not a backlash against Berlin’s sexual and artistic freedoms, “just as I do not see the election of Trump as a reaction to so-called wokeness or trans rights. Cultural manifestations do not cause such government changes. Economic forces do” — wealth gaps, regional deprivation, the east feeling second-class, then and now (the AfD’s heartland). The direct equivalences are rhetorical: America’s poisoned-blood language on immigrants comes “straight from the Goebbels playbook,” and the rights that flowered in twenties Germany were “instantly squished” in the thirties. As for today: the AfD polls high before Berlin’s September city elections, but the firewall holds — and the party is formally flagged by German intelligence as constitutionally dangerous. Andrew’s question stands: any vaccines for this thing?•       1929: The Year Everything Premiered. Why that year: Grosz, Sander, and Otto Dix at their peak; Brecht and Piscator both premiering; All Quiet on the Western Front, the underrated Grand Hotel, and Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookshops — plus Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician, the novella that predicted fascism; Billy Wilder still a weekly-paper journalist shooting his first film; and Christopher Isherwood arriving on the first visit that became Goodbye to Berlin and, via Broadway, Cabaret. “Only in retrospect do we see these things as major.” The culture flourished beside economic and political chaos — “having a terrible government is not inconsistent with producing good culture. Look at nineteenth-century Russia” — and when the chaos won, the exiles washed up in the German ghetto of Los Angeles: Brecht (on the beach, per this week’s Baerwald episode), Döblin, Mann. Many went back — Brecht in 1949, Piscator after — because in Hollywood and New York they “couldn’t live on the thin slice of culture,” a homesickness Lesser saw again in Berkeley’s own Czesław Miłosz, watching Americans like children playing in a sandbox.•       After Means 1989. The title’s twist: the After is not the Nazis’ arrival but the Wall’s fall. The dark half-century — twelve years of Reich, then “with barely a pause to take a breath” the divided city — is deliberately skipped: “the city is going to tell you what happened,” through what its monuments confess, like Bebelplatz’s memorial to the burned books of May 1933. Berlin now wears its freedom knowingly: graffiti flourishes precisely because speech was twice policed; May Day’s bottle-throwing is tolerated and swept up; Freiheit arrives like the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth — Andrew’s analogy, which she embraced with irony, since “nobody is totally free these days.” The Wall’s hothouse island remains separate from Germany half a century on. And the city stays cinematic to the point of unreality — Wings of Desire’s angels in the actual Staatsbibliothek (“I thought it was just a set”), Babylon Berlin’s set-choosers clearing away the present — with a thriller shelf to match: Deighton’s Berlin Game (freshly reread on his death), le Carré’s Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Herron, McEwan, Schneider’s Wall Jumper.•       A Mirror That Might Become Useful. Berlin’s deepest lesson is for after the fall: it is the city that acknowledges its bad deeds — monuments and plaques saying this is where we did it — while America “likes to brush it all aside and act like we’re always the heroes.” Andrew’s pushback landed: Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson’s lynching memorial, the African American Museum — “You’re right. I’m not being fair.” But the qualification sharpens rather than sinks the thesis: “we do not have a history yet like Holocaust Germany or even Berlin Wall Germany… It’s a mirror that might become useful if the worst comes about.” Meanwhile Berlin models the livable city: rent control the voters wanted to push all the way to expropriation, transit worth “ecstasies,” and a constitutional welfare clause promising a dignified existence — economic rights our Bill of Rights never mentions. The book ends aboard the M29 bus, top deck, regular fare, from the Maybachufer’s twice-weekly market (running since before 1929) across the old West to Grunewald. “Maybe you’re going to be made into a Berlin angel.” “A great fate.” About the Guest Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, the celebrated Berkeley literary quarterly, and the author of a novel and twelve works of nonfiction, including You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (winner of the Marfield Prize), Why I Read, and Scandinavian Noir. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center — and the American Academy in Berlin, where her love affair with the city deepened. Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times (Harper, September 2026) is her portrait of the city in 1929 and now. She divides her time between B...

“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher used to annoyingly say. Although Adelman, certainly no Thatcherite, isn’t celebrating the apparent inevitability of our capitalist epoch. What interests Adelman is the making and unmaking of what he calls the “global mind.” The revolutionary quality of capitalism, he says, is that we now think of strangers as somehow part of our community. So when Adam Smith, the moral philosopher father of economics, drank his Chinese tea while reading of a deadly earthquake in China, he recognized that capitalism inevitably entangled our moral thoughts with our self-interest. It wasn’t just economists who began to think differently of strangers. Artists as varied as Picasso, Joseph Conrad, and the photography-obsessed Émile Zola all made this moral inquiry of strangers the heart of their work. Yes, Adelman is probably right to say there’s no capitalist off-ramp in our post-global economy. But capitalism’s octopus-like “global mind” and its (mis)treatment of strangers should turn all economists into moral philosophers and all artists into observers of economics. Five Takeaways •       The Mind, Not the Material. Against Sven Beckert’s material history (which Adelman admired and reviewed in Foreign Affairs), The Capitalist Era studies how we think about capitalism — because the thinking sets the policies, creates the attachments, fuels the wars, and builds the institutions. Capitalism, on his dating, is an eighteenth-century invention that dawns with Adam Smith’s “commercial society”: the first economic system to tie strangers across the whole planet into one interdependent web — global from the very start. Its founding text is a thought experiment: Smith’s gentleman of humanity, drinking Chinese tea while reading of a Chinese earthquake, asked whether he minds the deaths of thousands as much as the pain in his little finger. The marketplace entangles our moralities — and the question of whether sympathy can keep pace with self-interest has governed the global mind ever since.•       No Exit in Capitalism. For or against? A fair question with a layered answer: we are all heirs to the Marxist tradition — inequality and exploitation are inherent to interdependence, and “the propensity to be predatory coexists with the propensity to be empathetic.” But the trap is real: “there’s no exit in capitalism” — leaving is so punitive that every socialist revolution has paid catastrophically, a logic Adelman calls part of “the awful cunning” of the Trump administration’s economic statecraft. Keynes versus Hayek? When Andrew suggested it amounted to a family squabble — a storm in a teacup — Adelman largely agreed: both camps accept that we live inside capitalism, arguing only over how to live interdependently. No exit, though, doesn’t mean no alternatives: the argument worth recovering — lost since the globalization of the 1980s was “dumped on us” — is which form of interdependence we actually want. Gramsci’s interregnum, the time for monsters, is exactly when that argument matters.•       The Veil Between Strangers. The book’s gallery: not only philosophers but artists — Picasso, the poets, Borges (“I have a hard time writing any book without” him) — and above all photographers, because how we think about strangers is mediated through media. Smith’s verb was to see: the stranger’s invisibility was the whole problem, and photography — cheap to reproduce, claiming realism — promised to remove the veil. Zola was obsessed with it; street photography made New York and London legible as cities of vice and poverty; and the Opium War photographs that reached London in the 1860s forced a scandal, because this suffering was inflicted by our own troops. But seeing bred a new problem Smith never foresaw: indifference — too many images numbing the sympathies they were meant to awaken. In today’s supersaturation of digital and artificially generated strangers, the early doubters’ warning compounds: market interdependence plus growing indifference between the interdependent is “a recipe for calamity.”•       Earth Hunger. The charge that capitalism is eating the planet is as old as capitalism: the era of Hobson’s Imperialism named the West’s insatiable appetite to conquer and carve — “earth hunger” — after the Boer War. Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement traveled the Congo River together: Conrad turned it into Heart of Darkness; Casement wrote the first great humanitarian reports — rubber for Europe’s bicycles and tires, extermination for the Congolese and then Amazonians — before renouncing the crown, joining the Irish rebellion, and hanging for treason. Slavery runs through the same river: on Smith’s mind from the start, the plantation bonanza’s awkward foundation, with dehumanization as extraction’s precondition — a through line to the 1930s. To James Crawford’s vanishing earth (last week’s episode), Adelman offers a friendly dissent: the earth isn’t vanishing, but the accelerating metabolism of resources — extracted inhumanely for those who live there — is stressing the system. Alternatives exist; exit does not.•       Hoard the Returns, Externalize the Burdens. Adelman refuses the apocalypse chorus: end-time arguments breed cynicism — grab what you can while you can — which is precisely what turned the 1930s murderous; and the great debate the 2008 crisis should have sparked was stifled by crisis management that worked too well. “Neoliberalism” he finds overblown — the world is a mixed, messy hybrid, China neither socialist nor neoliberal — and the Thucydides Trap is a “silly metaphor”: Sparta and Athens were never as interdependent as China and the United States. Hence the closing duel: Carney versus Trump as two arguments inside the global mind about how to need strangers. Trump, the Toronto-born historian argues, is no isolationist — his is a global vision that wants to “hoard the returns and externalize the burdens,” punishing the asymmetrically dependent (Canada above all) through a predator’s bilateralism whose 1930s pedigree Adelman names with discomfort. And China? Sitting on the sidelines, courting Canada, playing “an old game” of constructing and dividing markets — as old as the global mind itself. About the Guest Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge. Born in Toronto and educated at Toronto, the LSE, and Oxford, he has lived and worked in seven countries. His many books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of ...

“Seward had all the money and Seward had all the bullies. Lincoln didn’t have money or bullies, but by God, he had the people.” — Jonathan Earle Yesterday, Kurt Andersen fictionalized a 21st-century broken America without an Abe Lincoln as savior. Today we talk about the man himself with Jonathan Earle, author of He Has the People, a new history of the 1860 election that made Lincoln president and probably saved the then young Republic. Earle’s mission is to bring Lincoln down from Mount Rushmore. He tells the story of a flesh-and-blood politician, a six-foot-four autodidact who, in 1859, was barely known outside Illinois. What changed everything was John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Lincoln recognized as much, spending the winter in the archives of the State Library of Illinois, then delivering a speech at Cooper Union that won over the New York media. Then onto the Republican convention in Chicago where the wily Lincoln ran rings around the establishment candidate William Henry Seward. In 1860, Abe Lincoln became Lincoln. The rest is history. He Has the People should be required reading for both obscure Republicans and Democrats planning to run for president in a fatally divided election. Earle suspects that 2028 might be as historic as 1860. Perhaps it will deliver another politician with the wit and wisdom to bring a broken America together. Somebody who, like Abe, has the people. Five Takeaways •       Before Abe Was Lincoln. Earle’s stated mission: take Lincoln off Mount Rushmore and out of the throne Daniel Chester French sculpted, and restore the flesh-and-blood politician — “among the canniest politicians our country has produced, maybe the planet.” The pre-marble Lincoln: born in an actual Kentucky log cabin, wholly self-taught (favorite book: Euclid), the first genuinely Western president, six-foot-four when most men stood five-eight, a storyteller who learned politics riding the Illinois judicial circuit — breaking bread and sharing mattresses with judges and rival counsel — his ambition, in his law partner’s famous phrase, a little engine that knew no rest. In 1859 he was barely known outside Illinois, a one-term ex-congressman regarded as vice-presidential material at best — the Jon Ossoff of his day, Earle suggests: making noise, not yet a name. Americans declare every election the most important in history; Earle’s answer is the book’s premise: hold on — it’s not 1860.•       The 9/11 Before the Election. For decades both parties buried slavery beneath compromises — 1820, 1850 — until a tiny, hated minority of abolitionists forced the question. Then John Brown and twenty-one followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, intending to arm the enslaved (a plan so improvised, Earle notes, that Brown didn’t bring lunch). The raid detonated inside a presidential campaign — as if 9/11 had preceded the 2000 election, or Pearl Harbor come before FDR’s 1940 reelection — and it scrambled the chessboard: after Brown, every Southerner saw a secret John Brown in every Northerner, every Northerner saw a Slave Power that had run all three branches since the founding, and compromise died. Earle’s verdict, unusual for a historian: the Civil War was inevitable after John Brown — the only question was who would be in charge when it came.•       Chicagoland. Lincoln’s self-introduction was the strangest in campaign history: a tour of Bleeding Kansas (“the Gaza of the day”), then a winter of archival research in the State Library of Illinois, proving the founders believed they had the power to stop slavery’s spread — delivered at Cooper Union in February 1860 in a reedy high voice that nonetheless won Horace Greeley and the New York press: his Obama-in-Boston moment. William Henry Seward — the famous New York senator, the Hillary of the piece — led the first two convention ballots. But Lincoln’s handlers had pulled off the venue coup of the century (Chicago, his home state) and worked the smoky backrooms with offices, favors, and newspapers while their candidate wired “make no promises that bind me.” Seward was soft in Ohio and Indiana; the Republicans needed Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois; and a shocked Lincoln man coined the title: Seward had all the money and all the bullies — “but by God, he had the people.” Andrew’s caveat: in Chicago, “the people” were power brokers.•       A Revolution, Reported from Paddy’s Run. The general election was really two simultaneous contests: Lincoln versus Douglas in the North, Breckinridge versus Bell in the South — four candidates winning electoral votes, resolved as 180 for Lincoln (152 needed) on 39.8 percent of the popular vote, the lowest winning share in American history, with a scarcely believable 81.8 percent turnout. The franchise: white male citizens, no property requirement, citizenship easy enough that Democrats met the Irish ships at the docks — simultaneously the widest political participation on the planet and a restriction whose repair (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) would shut suffragists out for two more generations. Earle’s narrative spine is Murat Halstead of Paddy’s Run, Ohio — the nation’s first campaign journalist, the only man at all seven of 1860’s conventions, a Seward man who called it straight: this was a revolution — the first antislavery party wresting Washington from “Northern men with Southern principles” like Buchanan, Van Buren, and Pierce. And in the secession winter, Lincoln refused to compromise the victory away: We won.•       Is There a Lincoln Out There? Lincoln tops every presidential ranking, Earle argues, because he grew — the arc Earle compares to Bobby Kennedy’s journey from McCarthyite to tribune of the poor. This Lincoln moved from denying racial equality in 1860 to a final speech — John Wilkes Booth in the audience — endorsing the vote for Black Union soldiers: killed, in effect, for the growing. He held the 1864 election in the middle of the war he expected to lose it (Earle’s pointed contrast: Zelensky’s wartime postponement — “I think that’s a mistake”). To Andersen’s cheerful breakup scenario, the LSU historian — whose Louisiana is one-third African American — gave a hard no: disunion meant “unremitted servitude forever,” and the republic needs Mississippi and Wyoming alike. For 2028: historical contingency always wins — nobody had heard of Obama two years out, and the general public hasn’t heard the next name either. “I do think that there is a Lincoln out there. I do.” About the Guest Jonathan Earle teaches history and politics at Louisiana State University, where he has been Dean of the Ogden Honors College since 2014. A historian of antebellum American politics, he is the author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, and (as co-editor) Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri. He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Oxford University Press, Pivotal Moments in American History series) draws on t...

“We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” — Kurt Andersen, from The Breakup It’s 2045 and America has got divorced. That’s the premise of The Breakup, by the historian and novelist Kurt Andersen. “The future is fiction. It hasn’t happened yet,” the historian in Andersen reminds us. But his near-term fictional future, an America of civil war and national divorce, certainly isn’t inconceivable. Nor, in an increasingly divided United States between high-tech coastal elites and a medieval hinterland, does such a scenario appear quite as nightmarish as it once did. In contrast with the bloodiness, say, of Alex Garland’s Hollywood version of an American civil war, Andersen’s literary breakup is the “scattered violence of a Middle Eastern kind.” Lebanon comes to the United States in the form of loosely confederated militias, assassinations and kidnappings. This war kills 28,000, half of them civilians. It could have been worse. Indeed, it is worse today — when compared to the 44,000 people killed by guns each year. The novel also tells the story of the breakup of a twenty-three-year marriage between the Tennessean poet Natalie and the San Francisco tech bro Asher. Natalie doesn’t much like Silicon Valley and warns that “we are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” But for Andersen this age isn’t totally dark. Marriages and countries break up, he reminds us, and that is often the beginning rather than the end of the story. Not quite darkness at noon. So get ready for the mid-21st-century break-up of the United States. Such a split might actually be brighter than America’s current dark marriage. Five Takeaways •       The Future Is Fiction. After Fantasyland (five hundred years of how America went haywire) and Evil Geniuses (the last fifty), Andersen considered a third history — of the future — and realized the genre is folly: futurism is just experts guessing, Alvin Toffler in a new suit. “The future is fiction. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s imaginary until it happens.” So the trilogy’s conclusion became a novel — his fifth — and the bookseller algorithms’ “dystopian” label gets a correction: dystopian satire, maybe, but “we are in a dystopian period now.” Where Alex Garland’s Civil War embedded journalists inside the fighting, The Breakup lives with a couple seven years after it — the good, the bad, the thank-God-we-were-okay — and, chalk it up to the Midwestern upbringing, it ends ambiguous but not without hope.•       A Manageable Civil War. The backstory his fictional journalism flashes back to: a blue political comeback — Supreme Court expansion, Puerto Rico and DC statehood — ignites a ferocious right-wing backlash, and the violence that follows is “scattered… of a Middle Eastern kind”: loosely confederated militias assassinating, kidnapping, and bombing, while a presidential administration insists it’s a crime spree — until the military crushes the insurgency with drones and robots in eighteen months. The toll: 28,000 dead, half civilians, 45,000 wounded — numbers Andrew notes are roughly a single year of American gun deaths, and that Andersen’s character Natalie keeps in proportion: “could have been worse… We’re not living in Mad Max time.” Against the 1860s — millions dead from a far smaller population — this is a war America can talk itself into surviving. Which may be the scariest thing about it.•       The Disunion’s Logistics. The novel’s deep research problem: how would you actually do it? You can’t draw an 1860 line, because the real divide runs between cities and countryside, not North and South — so the negotiated Disunion takes seven years, producing Natalie’s Free American Republic and Asher’s smaller United States. The Brexit analogy gets swatted (“the EU is not a country” — this is a whole different deal), balkanization into five or twelve republics is doubted (the prosperities of scale), and the best twist is secessionist remorse: Montana runs the numbers and realizes the West, unlike the South, gives more to Washington than it takes — so why join them? Beneath it all, the state nobody thinks they need: Medicare, Social Security, the federal machinery people discover only as DOGE-style contempt dismantles it. And still, the magic holds: immigrants keep coming, because only in America do you become American by showing up.•       The Soft Breakup Papers. The nonfiction beneath the novel is Andersen’s New York Times essay: America as a long, loveless marriage — separate lives, separate tracks, staying together for the kids — that may already have had its soft breakup. His research assembled what nobody had put together: ten- and twenty-state climate alliances, sanctuary cities, Second Amendment sanctuary states and a thousand such counties — “governmental apparatuses emerging for these separate governments” since 2009, unremarked because the only people saying “national divorce” were Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rush Limbaugh, and nobody serious could agree with them. The mechanism is Hemingway’s bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. Fintan O’Toole warned him the book could become self-fulfilling prophecy; Andersen answered that the elephant in the room must be named — and he has the Cassandra receipts, having published Fantasyland’s post-truth diagnosis before Trump was first elected. “Don’t blame me. We’ll reconnoiter in ten or twenty years.”•       A Bright and Shiny Dark Age. The episode’s keeper, from the novel’s tech-despising heroine: “We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” One political party marches back toward the medieval — no public health, no vaccines, no intellectualism — while the Bay Area ships magic, William Gibson’s unevenly distributed future arriving all at once. In 2045, AI is background hum “like electricity,” the tech trillionaires are plural, and the robots are everywhere and unremarkable — though Andersen’s own book trade is his caution against straight lines: print was declared dead fifteen years ago and still sells half of all books. The age of anxiety — the loneliness, social media’s riled-and-angry business model (30% of the blame or 70%, “but it’s large”), a president “selling pessimism” in his simultaneous idiocy and brilliance against optimism’s old American pillar — reads, in the novel’s hindsight, like the premonition of the breakup. And yet no zombies, no rubble: not without hope. About the Guest Kurt Andersen is the New York Times bestselling author of the histories Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, and the novels Turn of the Century, Heyday, True Believers, and You Can’t Spell America Without Me. Co-founder of Spy magazine and longtime host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, he has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. The Breakup (Random House, August 2026), his fifth novel, is set in the AI-suffused, post-civil-war America of 2045 — “the most brilliant social novelist of our time,” per Walter Isaacson, “in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo, but even funnier and deeper.”&nbsp...

Grandfathers, grandfathers. Yesterday, David Baerwald talked about his grandfather, Ernst Baerwald, an American spy in Second World War Japan. Today, Katie S. Sanders talks about her grandfather, Murray Simon, whose life was saved by an American spy in Second World War France. In Ortiz’s War, co-authored with historian Nicholas Reynolds, Sanders writes about Peter Ortiz, who became the Allies’ secret weapon against the Nazis in France. With his stunning looks, Ortiz might have been a Hollywood creation. Polylingual Franco-American aristocrat, French Foreign Legion, race-car driver, circus lion tamer, the most battle-decorated member of America’s first spy agency. He even played himself (anonymous brave soldier) in a number of post-war Hollywood movies. I wish he was my grandfather. Five Takeaways •       The Spy Who Saved Her Grandfather. Murray Simon was a 23-year-old Jewish kid from Queens who had never flown before the Army Air Forces trained him — then sent him over occupied France in a black-painted B-24 Liberator carrying spy supplies and carrier pigeons for the resistance. Shot down on May 6, 1944, a month before D-Day, on an OSS mission whose standing advice was don’t get shot down — spies were tortured and killed, not taken prisoner — he was hidden by a Bulgarian-born Jew passing as Catholic, a man with an eight-month-old daughter and a pregnant wife who was “already supposed to be dead” and opened his door anyway. Smuggled onward, Murray was intercepted by Peter Ortiz — and made it home to the GI Bill, a family, and what he called “the warm womb of Uncle Sam.” Katie never met him; the book is her way of meeting him. “I gravitate towards stories of resistance, probably in part because I’m a product of one.” Publication day: the anniversary of the liberation of Paris.•       No Peacetime Soldier. Peter J. Ortiz’s résumé reads like an unpublishable novel: son of a founding editor of Paris Vogue; French boarding-school runaway into the Foreign Legion (North Africa, Casablanca included); merchant seaman, dude-ranch manager, race-car driver, circus lion tamer; wounded fighting the Germans in 1940, captured, serially escaped — once off a hospital train under a dead soldier’s identity; docked in New York the day after Pearl Harbor and enlisted in the Marines, rising to become the most battle-decorated member of the OSS and one of the most decorated Marines of the war. His military file: not a good candidate for a desk job, ever. He spoke five languages, not Wikipedia’s ten (“Wikipedia is a storyteller”), walked into bars in occupied France wearing his Marine uniform, and wrote his own epitaph in a twenty-page memoir: “I’m no peacetime soldier.” Afterward: John Ford’s Hollywood, minor roles, his own uniforms as costume — and no bragging, ever.•       The Heroic Surrender at Centron. The book’s climax is Operation Union II, August 1944 — Ortiz’s own inter-Allied mission into the Alps, culminating in the massive “Le Grand Parachutage” supply drop to the Maquis. He recruited his own Parris Island parachute instructors — Marines who remembered the legionnaire who blew them all away at boot camp — plus Francis Coolidge: Harvard dropout, fellow Foreign Legion veteran, and great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson. When his patrol was surrounded at the village of Centron by vastly superior German forces on a murderous late-war rampage, Ortiz chose saving the town over fighting — the surrender as the war’s most heroic act, bravery as the capacity to think while being shot at. Centron celebrates him every year; Katie was just there with Marines stationed in Germany, for the eighty-second anniversary. Guiding lights: noblesse oblige, Don Quixote, and a lifelong allergy to McCarthyism.•       Wild Bill’s Wartime Startup. The OSS — forerunner of the CIA, whose Langley lobby still holds Wild Bill Donovan’s statue — was, in Katie’s telling, a wartime startup: 13,000 military and civilian personnel, mostly Wall Street lawyers, bankers, cryptographers, and cartographers, with a tiny operational subset that included Moe Berg, Virginia Hall trekking the Pyrenees on a wooden leg, and Ortiz. Donovan — World War One Medal of Honor recipient, FDR’s “secret legs,” the man who could “see an acorn, envision an oak tree” — was banned from D-Day as the one man carrying too many secrets, and went sniffing around anyway. J. Edgar Hoover was considered for the job and rejected, with Churchill’s SOE helping tip the choice. “I respect Donovan a lot more than I respect J. Edgar Hoover.” The lineage runs straight to today’s Navy SEALs and MARSOC — including past Keen On guest Brandon Webb.•       Are We in 1939? Katie walks the museum timelines — 1933, and it’s “not great”; 1936, and the warnings mount; “I certainly hope we’re not in 1939.” Against Andrew’s needling about greatest-generation nostalgia (via Brandon Webb’s complicated heroism, Kristin Beck’s good-and-evil seduction, Richard Overy’s question of whether the war ever ended, and Matt Damon’s regret-soaked Odysseus), she holds the line: someone like Ortiz is great in any time — and especially needed when democracy is under threat. The warfare itself has closed its chapter: her grandfather’s black-painted bomber and carrier pigeons have become Ukraine’s drones, delivering aid with less risk and less human connection alike. What survives the technology is the lesson: heroes don’t brag — her grandfather and Ortiz would be mortified by the spotlight — and by illuminating what they did, the rest of us might learn to do the right thing. About the Guest Katie S. Sanders is an award-winning journalist who has written for National Geographic, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, TIME, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. Her reporting has brought her to the CIA, the White House, and the homes and reunions of World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors. After discovering that her late grandfather — a Jewish-American pilot shot down over France — was rescued by Peter Ortiz, she teamed up with the historian Nicholas Reynolds (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy) to co-author Ortiz’s War (Harper Horizon, August 25, 2026). A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. References: •       Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders (Harper Horizon, August 25, 2026).•       Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy by Nicholas Reynolds — the co-author’s Hemingway biography, the book that put him on Katie’s radar.•       The Fire Agent by David Baerwald — yesterday’s episode: another grandfather, another secret war, rendered as fiction where this one insists on fact.•    &nb...

“That’s how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” — David Baerwald Earlier this month, the historian James M. Scott came on the show to talk about those three deadly days in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Today we return to that war in the skies above Japan. Only with a fictional twist. Behind this fiction, however, is the kind of family saga that few novelists have either the nerve or imagination to invent. It concerns three generations of the Baerwalds. In the Thirties, a German Jewish organic chemist called Ernst Baerwald worked for (of all people) I.G. Farben, the company that manufactured the gas used at Auschwitz. A sophisticated Japanophile, Baerwald was Farben’s man in Tokyo, where he hobnobbed with a member of the royal family. American intelligence turned Ernst Baerwald into a spy, using his intimate knowledge of Japan in their firebombing of Tokyo. In exchange, Baerwald fled to the United States with his wife and son Hans, who became a leading authority on 20th century Japanese politics. Hans’ son, David Baerwald, meanwhile, became a platinum-selling musician who has worked with Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, and Bruce Springsteen. Growing up in California, David knew little about Ernst. But seven years ago, while clearing out the family home after the Los Angeles fires, he discovered his grandfather’s diaries, photographs, and letters. He found a 1943 speech to the American Intelligence School proving that Ernst, a German Jew who loved Japan, knew the details of the Tokyo firebombing in which 140,000 people died, two years before it happened. “I have no qualifications as a historian,” David Baerwald confesses. So what followed was The Fire Agent, a 624-page novel loosely imagined around his grandfather’s enigmatic life. But what David brought to this epic was a lyricist’s skill in the kind of musical composition that enabled him to keep characters in play like sections of an orchestra. No wonder then that The Fire Agent is one of the most acclaimed literary debuts of the year. And no wonder that, in our age of looming fascism, The Fire Agent reads as more than just history. Five Takeaways •       Papers Found in a Fire. The novel began, appropriately, in flames: during a Los Angeles fire at an old family home, Baerwald discovered his grandfather’s papers — among them a 1943 speech delivered at the American Intelligence School in San Francisco, proving that Ernst Baerwald was deeply involved in, or at least privy to, the planning of the Tokyo firebombing two years before the bombs fell in March 1945. The shock was moral as much as archival: everything David knew of his grandfather was how much he loved Japan and hated what happened to it. The contradiction became an obsession, the obsession became an investigation — of one family, and of the joining of industry and fascism in three countries — and the investigation became a novel, because “I have no qualifications as a historian” and a novel allows some jokes to carry the tragedy’s weight.•       The Man Who Knew Where the Gas Was. Ernst Baerwald, the family’s “dye seller,” was nothing so modest: dyestuffs being slang for organic chemistry, he was Asia director of the chemical cartel that supplied IG Farben — the conglomerate that built a work camp at Auschwitz — a violinist mentor to Prince Takamatsu, and a German Jew too valuable to fire until far too late. He helped build Tokyo’s natural gas distribution system after the Kanto earthquake, which meant he knew every depot, fuel store, and pumping station in the city he loved — knowledge that made this dual enemy alien mysteriously trusted by American intelligence. His OSS box is nearly empty; the OSS Society’s verdict was “he was a commie.” Behind him stands the Philanthropin — the Frankfurt school of the Jewish Enlightenment his father Hermann ran — which raised Ernst antifascist before fascism existed: “before he was a German, before he was an American, before he was a lover of Japan, he was a hater of tyranny.”•       “So We Firebombed the Civilians.” The moral reckoning at the book’s heart: 140,000 killed in Tokyo, sixty-five more cities burned — while the industrial strip from Tokyo to Yokohama was deliberately spared, because America wanted it intact to rebuild the Japanese economy after the war. Baerwald calls the firebombing “an atrocity of unspeakable terms” and, following Gar Alperovitz, questions the necessity of the atomic bombs — a message to the Soviets more than a strategy against Japan. His father, scheduled for the invasion that never came, felt lifelong relief at Hiroshima — one of many things father and son never discussed. “Why do fathers and sons have problems? A lot of reasons.” The writing became a posthumous reconciliation: “I understand more of my father than I ever did when he was alive. I’ve forgiven him a lot.” The next book is about him — the UCLA Japan scholar who lost his security clearance to McCarthyism for being insufficiently anti-communist about China.•       From Boomtown to The Fire Agent. What a songwriter brings to a 624-page epic: reliability — a working lyricist learns he can “write a page on demand” — and orchestration, since composing instrumental music means keeping track of characters the way you track an orchestra, knowing what each instrument cannot play. Baerwald’s formation was the émigré Los Angeles of a breakfast joint on the Pacific Coast Highway where his surf crew gathered mornings — the same tables once shared by Duke Kahanamoku, Bertolt Brecht, and Stravinsky, in the Santa Monica neighborhood of Thomas Mann, on the street where James Dean later lived. Brecht was always his favorite lyricist, a secret he kept: in Los Angeles, admit you want to write songs like Brecht and “they lock you up in a padded room.” The German Jewish musical tradition that fled to his hometown now flows, a generation on, back into prose.•       The Music of Fascism. The novel’s present-tense purpose: fascist movements “have a very limited vocabulary,” and sometimes it’s easier to hear how stupid it is from the mouths of foreigners. The mechanisms — how such movements are funded, how they function, what they do with total power — were identical in Germany, Japan, and Italy, and the contemporary echoes are “impossible to avoid. They’re identical.” All three countries ended as rubble. In Japan, where prime minister Takaichi stands in the lineage of Kishi Nobusuke and Nanking denial persists, the conservatives will object; Baerwald hopes to spark debates. And asked what neo-fascism sounds like, he composed it: Kundera’s kitsch — the child in the field, the tear on the cheek, “sanitized absurdities because the truth is so bloody awful” — rendered as a music-box melody gradually tortured by Ligeti dissonance, resolving into the Shepard tone: an audio illusion of endless ascent that never arrives. “That’s how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” About the Guest David Baerwald is an award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, and recording artist, best known fo...

What’s the truth about our AI future? Our guests have different takes. On the one hand, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee predict a $7 trillion future for just three AI startups in 2027. On the other, Salima Bhimani doesn’t believe that Silicon Valley has the imagination to create the moonshot to address our jobless future. For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, it’s a time for what he calls “champions.” What he wants is the development of a “human dividend” from intelligence. Supposedly this will be provided by the multi-trillion dollar AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that will pioneer the social ownership of intelligence. But a Norwegian-style Human Wealth Fund is about as likely, I suspect, as a new Freddie Mercury recording of “We Are the Champions.” Dream on. Salima Bhimani is right. The moonshot to fix our jobless AI future won’t come out of workaholic Silicon Valley. Look elsewhere for those types of champions, my friends. Brazil perhaps. The movie, not the country. Five Takeaways •       The Zeitgeist Exaggerates. The week’s split screen: a $7 trillion future for OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX on one side; Ed Luce’s “AI phobia” consensus and Jill Lepore’s AI-versus-the-people politics on the other. Keith’s contrarian read: the negativity is loud but thin. Most intelligent people already use AI daily — from high school onward — and simply don’t talk about it; weigh the happy users against the vocal critics and the users “massively dominate.” He suspects a tipping point has been reached, with the anti-AI minority “starting to sound a little cultish.” The political stakes are his real worry: if the Democrats mistake the noise for populism and run against AI, they will lose 2028 “quite heavily” — and Lepore, he charges, is writing opinion, not history.•       Who Are the Champions? The editorial’s diagnosis: the problem isn’t negativity but “the lack of vocal connection between AI and people’s futures.” The champions exist — but they hedge everything into pointlessness, “trained as politicians as opposed to business leaders,” each with a little voice saying don’t upset anybody. “Can you imagine any other major breakthrough in human history where people would be shy to champion it?” His roster pointedly omitted both Dario Amodei and Elon Musk (“fairly balanced with who I left out”); the goal is to assemble the articulate case so “the minority who are politicizing negativity can be exposed as a minority.” Andrew’s genealogy for the project: Nixon’s silent majority, reborn with a token budget.•       90% Sacks — and Squashed Armadillos. The hour’s fault line ran through David Sacks’s tweet: Dario believes frontier AI is “too powerful to distribute”; Sacks believes it is “too powerful to centralize,” fearing a marriage of corporate and state power. Andrew took Dario’s side; Keith claimed the middle until Andrew invoked the Texas rule — the only thing in the middle of the road is squashed armadillos — and extracted a confession: “I agree with Sacks, I’d say, 90%.” The 10% is Keith’s own position: happy with centralized giants (free intelligence needs their investment) and happy with the growing edge — the world’s intelligence in a solar-powered box, no grid required. Dario is championing “handcuffs on AI”; Lepore’s car-regulation analogy fails because corporations are already regulated and AI itself is safe; and Helen Toner’s Hugging Face alarm, aired on Ezra Klein’s podcast, was “contrived in a lab” — a dismissal that sparked the hour’s frenemy flashpoint: “Are you telling me I’m ignorant of something?”•       Metering the Dividend. Keith solved Andrew’s billing mystery on air: the $100-a-month Claude plan that throttled him last week has a quota page he never found — and the price is “actually a very generous amount. They’re losing money on you.” The honest price would be $200 to $400. Hence the editorial’s champion, Stripe: its acquisition of OpenRouter — which routes every prompt across all the models to the cheapest good answer — puts the payments company in the middle of the token traffic stream. Azeem Azhar’s $6 AI agent points the direction: prices tending toward zero at the edge, free for the kid, the school, and the hospital, paid for by the company running three thousand agents — even if delivering intelligence to six billion people ultimately costs tens of trillions. The parable: a Chinese dumpling shop built an agent API so customers’ AIs could place orders, and sales went through the roof — the corner store getting a website, circa 1994. “You could do it with Keen On,” Keith noted. Meanwhile founders live like Captain Kirk on the bridge — productivity through the roof, but the agents must be flown daily.•       The Human Dividend. The coda: Keith’s book is done, and its name is settled — The Human Dividend, asking who owns intelligence. Written in two days, cut from eighty thousand words to sixty in three more — seventeen chapters rewritten paragraph by paragraph in an AI agent’s two-panel editor, purging repetition and AI-isms until “it was a Keith Teare-written book.” The thesis in one line: intelligence is the central product of this era; its surplus is co-produced; the property should be too. The mechanism: a Human Wealth Fund on the Alaska-Norway model — one share per person, given not bought, expiring at death with no inheritance — funded by AI companies donating equity on day one and governed by its own constitution, no state involved (unlike Trump’s $1,000 baby accounts: what the state gives, the state can take away). The pitch to the companies: owners, not just users, are how you win affinity. Sell it or give it away? To be continued in two weeks — Andrew is off to Italy, and Manchester United, who lost to Hull, are off the champions list entirely. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the co-host of the weekly That Was The Week segment on Keen On America and editor of the That Was The Week tech newsletter. Founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation, he was previously a founder of TechCrunch (with Michael Arrington), Archimedes Labs, EasyNet, and cyber café Cyberia. A serial entrepreneur across four decades of Silicon Valley and London tech, he writes weekly on the state of innovation — and is completing his first book, The Human Dividend. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith Teare’s newsletter; this week’s editorial: “Who Are the Champions?”•       Ed Luce’s Financial Times column on “AI phobia” as America’s new consensus — its third invocation on this show in a week.•       Jill Lepore’s FT weekend essay and new book on “AI versus the people” — the politics of 2026 and 2028, per America’s best historian.•       David Sacks’s tweet on Dario Amodei — “too powerful to distribute” versus “too powerful to centralize” — the hour’s fault line.•       Helen Toner’s conversation with Ezra Klein on the Hugging Face incide...

“Just because I think something is dumb doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal.” — Nicholas Anthony on meme coins Earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren called for an SEC investigation of Donald Trump’s meme coin. Is the Pope Catholic? No surprise there. More revealing are other critics of the “presidential” token which netted our Grifter-in-Chief $636 million last year. Take, for example, Nicholas Anthony, an expert on crypto at the Cato Institute and author of Digital Currency or Digital Control? It’s news when an unashamed libertarian from Washington’s own temple of free markets calls the president’s crypto adventure “completely unnecessary.” Maybe the Pope isn’t Catholic. Or maybe Elizabeth Warren should join the Cato Institute. Anthony’s verdict is withering because, under his libertarian shell, he’s a crypto bro. The meme coin “has been a problem for everyone but Trump,” he argues, because it has held up legislation, invited investigations, and weaponized ethics concerns about crypto. “We have no one to blame except Trump…” Anthony concludes bleakly. “He knew better than to do it, but he saw the opportunity and ran with it.” When I accused Anthony of sounding like Elizabeth Warren, he was more amused than offended. Unlike the Warren crowd, however, he doesn’t want to ban crypto. “Just because I think something is dumb,” he says, “doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal.” So while Trump-style meme coins are a natural habitat for what he calls “rug pulls,” that shouldn’t be an excuse for lawmakers to pull the rug from the entire industry. Crypto can still revolutionize finance, Anthony believes. It can democratize centralized banking. It can make money fairer. Just don’t confuse that with a Melania meme coin. Five Takeaways •       A Hard No from Cato. The week’s most surprising critic of Trump’s meme coin isn’t a Democrat — it’s a Cato libertarian. Anthony’s verdict: “completely unnecessary,” legally gray but ethically indefensible, and “a problem for everyone but Trump” — stalling the crypto legislation the industry actually wants, inviting investigations, and handing opponents a weapon. The explanation is pure self-interest: the first-term Trump attacked crypto as competition to the dollar and pushed policies hostile to the space; the second-term convert was swayed by industry lobbying and campaign money, the opportunity for personal enrichment, and crypto’s libertarian-conservative DNA. “We have no one to blame except for Trump… He knew better than to do it, but he saw the opportunity and ran with it.”•       Dumb, But Not Illegal. The libertarian line in one sentence: “Just because I think something is dumb doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal.” Meme coins are “a trading card of sorts” — their value is the person behind them, held up only as long as people stay amused — and a natural habitat for rug pulls, where insiders manufacture interest and vanish with the proceeds. Anthony opposes bans; he demands disclosure, and insists fraud be prosecuted whether it’s snake oil from a cart or a token from a president. Hence the kicker: a Warren-style investigation of the sitting president is “perfectly reasonable,” and “if it turns out he was doing something behind the scenes, then I think he should be prosecuted for it.” From what he’s seen, the fans knew what they were buying — but the line between brilliantly marketed and fraudulently sold is exactly what investigations exist to draw.•       The Dollar Launders Better. Isn’t crypto the ideal vehicle for laundering money? “Not so much. The US dollar is definitely the ideal vehicle” — and remains the currency of choice for criminals worldwide. The numbers: roughly one percent of cryptocurrency activity has been identified as illegal, against about five percent of US dollar usage — because the dollar is accepted everywhere, even in criminal circles, and cash, once it leaves your hand, is gone. Most cryptocurrencies, by contrast, run on public blockchains: permanent, searchable records that forensic accounting firms mine daily, and that keep catching criminals who never understood that the ledger remembers everything. The moral panic, Anthony suggests, is aimed at the wrong instrument.•       Free Banking’s Revenge. The deeper Cato case: cryptocurrency — born of cypherpunk and libertarian ideas after the 2008 crisis — is “for the first time in over a hundred years, the challenge to the idea that central banks have complete and total ownership of what is money.” Its ancestors are Scottish free banking and the note-issuing American banks that cleared payments for decades before the Federal Reserve existed. The prosecution’s exhibits against central banking: Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation queues, where friends of Anthony’s watched food become unaffordable while they waited in line, and the slower American version — $10,000 bought two Corvettes in 1970 and needs to be $80,000 today. No utopias: Bitcoin won’t erase the debt. But competition would supply the missing incentive for governments to be “better stewards of currency” — and the practice already exists, from Argentina and Lebanon to the crypto hubs of Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.•       Swept Up by Trump. The sadder confession concerns his own side: “Sadly, many conservatives have been swept up by Trump… the president can do no wrong” — Ted Cruz and Mike Lee among the obsequious, blocking the ethics language Democrats want attached to crypto legislation. The principled exception is Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis: pro-Trump, yes, but one of the rare members of Congress who has done the technical and philosophical homework. The industry itself — Coinbase included — walks a careful line around the man who will sign its rules into law, seeing the damage but saying little. Anthony acknowledges his privilege: “Here at the Cato Institute, I can call balls and strikes.” As for the wider economy: a storm in a teacup for now — while crypto’s speculative fever has migrated to AI, whose models are quietly integrating the coins as their payment rails. It’s not what Satoshi envisioned; the cypherpunks and the bankers will split the inheritance. About the Guest Nicholas Anthony is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, a fellow at the Human Rights Foundation, and a member of the Economic Inclusion Group’s Advisory Board. His research covers central bank digital currencies, financial privacy, cryptocurrency, and the use of money in society. The author of Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money, he has testified before Congress, maintains the Human Rights Foundation’s CBDC Tracker, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and Business Insider. Originally from Baltimore, he holds an MA in economics from George Mason University. References: •       Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money by Nicholas Anthony (Cato Institute).•       Senator Elizabeth Warr...

“If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won’t have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” — Salima Bhimani Finally some inventive news in our summer of Luddite discontent. Salima Bhimani spent six and a half years at Google X’s moonshot factory as its first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech. So thank her for the (responsible) magic of Alphabet’s Waymo, Wing, and DeepMind. In her new book, Invent Now, Bhimani provides a map for the next wave of moonshots. No, she speculates, they probably won’t come out of Silicon Valley. But, yes, they will come from somewhere. Her invention was formed long before Silicon Valley. She remembers staring at the Toronto subway from her father’s magazine stall and wondering not where the trains went but “what is our relationship to this tube?” An ethnographer by training, Bhimani arrived at Google X from a world of government and nonprofits where “constraint was bread and butter.” At Alphabet, of course, she was spoilt with endless money and runway. Although that didn’t always guarantee moonshot success. Moonshots fail, she explains, because they are always more than technologies. They are ecosystems, and they need the approval of regulators, communities, and consumers. Take, for example, the abortive Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s smart-city bet in her hometown of Toronto, which failed to recognize the practical realities of utopian city-planning. So what will be the most dramatic moonshot of the twenty-first century? No, she says, it probably won’t be consumer rocketships to Mars or a cure for cancer. Instead, it will be about a post-labor society. What is human purpose when it’s not work? No wonder such an outrageous idea probably won’t come out of work-obsessed Silicon Valley. Five Takeaways •       A Nuanced Optimist. Bhimani isn’t surprised by the Luddite lurch: people feel “compressed by things they can’t control,” surrounded by technology doing things they don’t understand — and it’s hot out. But against thirty years of Silicon Valley boosterism she offers neither cheerleading nor despair: hold the tension. Technology surveils, and drones make war; technology also lets more people solve problems that were previously unsolvable. She refuses the binary of the moment — the abundance gospel of the Andreessens versus the scarcity warnings of James Crawford — predicting instead “abundance in some areas and scarcity in others”: your spreadsheet skills may become worthless precisely as your capacity to build becomes unprecedented. The task is holding both truths with what she calls a discerning eye, treating technology as a co-partner in a relationship where the friction stays alive.•       From the Toronto Subway to the Moonshot Factory. Her father ran a magazine stall in the Toronto subway, and young Salima stared at the trains asking an ethnographer’s question: not where are the people going, but “what is our relationship to this tube?” She came to Alphabet from government and nonprofits, where “constraint was bread and butter” — and met the opposite: endless money, endless runway, and audacity as the house style. As Alphabet’s first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech, she sat with the CEOs of the Other Bets asking about trade-offs: “Are you willing to take on the potential that your drone could be used in nefarious ways — and how are you gonna ensure that doesn’t happen?” Now on her own — no Google badge to fly doors open — she finds leaving “opens up the aperture”: fifty-one years of experience, and both worlds, constraint and abundance, informing everything she builds.•       She Folded Her Own Moonshot. The episode’s quiet bombshell: after leaving Alphabet, Bhimani co-founded a drone-detection company — and discovered what it feels like when the awkward questions are aimed at you. The full-stack solution she was building could genuinely help cities and communities; it could also be used for “all kinds of nefarious things.” Intention, she warns, is “pie in the sky when people actually are impacted”: the moment to map the worst case is now, not five years after your technology is loose in the world — because you will have to live with the choices you make. Some people can live with the range of implications; she and her co-founders decided they couldn’t: “We folded our drone company because the implications are not something that any of us could have lived with.” Responsible tech, practiced on herself.•       Moonshots Are Ecosystems (Ask Sidewalk). The factory’s deepest lesson: a moonshot is never just a technology. Wing isn’t drones — it’s regulators, safety, and whether communities want packages falling on their porches; the ecosystem must come first, not at the last mile. Sidewalk Labs — Alphabet’s smart-city bet in her own Toronto — consulted widely, meant well, and died anyway on public distrust of big tech’s data appetite: an early tremor, Andrew suggests, of today’s earthquake against data centers, and evidence of a “massive gap” between society and technology that still hasn’t closed. Google fumbling Geoffrey Hinton’s generative breakthrough shows the other constraint: inside a company the size of a country, innovation must also become the next billion-dollar business. The counterexample is Waymo — sixteen years of perseverance toward John Krafcik’s bigger mandate (self-driving technology, cars merely one expression) — and perhaps Demis Hassabis, whom the latest reshuffle might just free “to be Demis.”•       Step In, Not Stepped Out. AI wasn’t born yesterday — it spent thirty or forty years in labs, integrated into our lives in the background — and that incubation is precisely her warning: “If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won’t have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” The large language models belong to “the Googles and the Anthropics,” and most of us aren’t inside those companies. Her flip: if such powerful things were built in incubated spaces, imagine what could be built in unincubated ones — collective intelligence as our superpower, moonshots born from the convergence of places, people, and contexts rather than from Silicon Valley’s playbook. The century’s biggest moonshot, she suspects, is labor itself: what is human purpose when it’s not work? Her closing instruction, and the episode’s stamp: “We gotta step in and not be stepped out.” About the Guest Salima Bhimani, PhD, was Alphabet’s first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech, Business, and Leaders, working for six and a half years with moonshot companies including Waymo, Wing, DeepMind, and Google X. An ethnographer by training who came to Silicon Valley from government and nonprofits, she is now CEO of 10X Responsible Tech and a senior fellow at AI 2030. Invent Now: The Next Leap in Moonshots (John Wiley & Sons, 2026), her first book, introduces the Third Space — a new lens for building moonshots from the convergence of technolog...

“When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder asked in 77 AD. Two thousand years later, the answer seems clear. At least according to the contemporary Scottish natural historian James Crawford. In his new book, The Vanishing Earth, the Edinburgh-based Crawford provides dispatches from what he calls the “frontiers of extraction.” From the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to the melting coastline of Greenland, Crawford describes the apocalyptic consequences of our avarice toward the earth. The ultimate frontier of extraction, Crawford warns, is ourselves. Thus he reports on big tech’s designs to harvest our thoughts. Consumer headsets are already reading our brainwaves, Apple holds patents for brain-reading earbuds, and another self-styled “leader in real-world neuroscience” once promised “neuro insights for marketing purposes.” The Vanishing Earth’s apocalyptic warnings appear both timeless and immediate. Watching Roman miners destroy Spanish mountains, Pliny the Elder wondered when we would finally exhaust the earth. Today, we can quantify the answer. Sometime around 2020, the weight of everything humanity has built came to exceed the weight of all life on Earth. It was just three percent in 1900. We have extracted more in the past fifty years than in all prior human history combined. We now build a city the size of Paris every five days. The ideology of endless growth is only 300 years old, Crawford warns. Pliny the Elder’s earth is history. Crawford confesses that he is a product of extraction himself. On his family’s windowsill sits a lemonade bottle of the first North Sea crude, siphoned by his father the day it came ashore. “I am Scottish, after all,” he notes wryly. Will our avarice transform extraction into extinction? Not necessarily, Crawford explains. His last dispatch is from Butte, Montana, and offers a ray of hope. There he finds people trying to repair the seemingly apocalyptic consequences of copper mining on the earth. So apocalypse now doesn’t mean apocalypse tomorrow. We still have the power to unvanish the earth, the agency to undo the avarice of our ancestors. Five Takeaways •       Pliny’s Two Questions. Watching Roman gold miners collapse entire Spanish mountains — ruina montium, “the fall of mountains” — the great naturalist Pliny the Elder asked, two thousand years ago: “When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” Those two questions run like an entwined seam through Crawford’s book, and he believes we’re now getting the answers. The ideology of endless economic growth, he argues, is only about 300 years old — born in Enlightenment Scotland as freedom from famine and the caprices of nature, and entirely sensible at the time. The problem is that the planet has changed and the ideology hasn’t. The “vanishing” of the title isn’t only resources: it’s the sixth extinction, the biodiversity collapse — and, potentially, us.•       A Lemonade Bottle of First Oil. Crawford is a product of extraction, and knows it. His great-grandfather fled Shetland fishing at sixteen, wrote “engineer” on his immigration form, and ended up on Ford’s very first assembly line building the Model T. His father apprenticed in a coal mine, worked the Zambian Copperbelt, then spent thirty years in oil — which is why Crawford was born on the Shetland Islands, beside one of the world’s largest construction sites. The day the first North Sea oil came ashore, his father — who ran the pipelines and knew where to go — filled a lemonade bottle from an outlet valve; it still sits on the family windowsill. “I am a product of extraction. But then we all are”: microplastics in our bodies, forever chemicals passing from mother to unborn child. As a species, we have merged with what we mine.•       Thought Extraction. The journey’s final landscape is the mind. Consumer neurotech — EEG headsets promising calm and focus — is already reading brainwaves, and the direction of travel is unmistakable: Emotiv scrubbed “neuro insights for marketing purposes” from its website between fact-check and publication (Crawford found the old language on the Wayback Machine); Apple holds patents for EEG-reading earbuds, with Meta and Snap filing alongside. Rafael Yuste’s Neurorights Foundation surveyed the roughly thirty companies selling neurotech to consumers and found that every one of them claimed unlimited access to customers’ brain data — with no legal protection in place. The attention economy harvested our behavior; the next extraction, Crawford warns, is the thought itself.•       Heavier Than Life Itself. The statistics that stopped Crawford in his tracks: around 2020, the weight of everything humans have built — buildings, roads, plastics — came to exceed the weight of the Earth’s entire biomass, up from three percent in 1900. We’ve extracted more in fifty years than in all prior history; we build a Paris every five days; in ten years China poured more cement than America managed in the whole twentieth century. Hence the global sand shortage (desert sand is useless — “like building with marbles”) that sent him to Greenland, where melting glaciers make the coastline grow while the world’s shrink. And hence the hard questions about the energy transition: in 2025 humanity burned more wood, more coal, and more oil than ever before — not a transition but an accumulation, exactly as the Jevons paradox predicted when Victorian Britain worried about coal. Efficiency doesn’t reduce use; it multiplies it.•       The Forever Repair. The book ends not in despair but in Butte, Montana — once the center of world copper production, its open-cast pit now a lake of sulfuric acid in the heart of the city. After thirty years of argument, a settlement around 2020 gave the city something unprecedented: BP holds a blank check to monitor Butte’s soils and water in perpetuity, and the people, rather than abandon their home, stayed to watch over it and tell its story. “It’s not you fix and you forget. Everything is a repair.” That, for Crawford, is the ideological shift the whole journey points toward — from extraction to repair. He is hopeful for one precise reason: we got here through a way of seeing the world, and minds can change. In the tradition of Silent Spring — which banned DDT and birthed the EPA — a book can still move the world. “I am Scottish, after all” — but the glass, on inspection, is half full. About the Guest James Crawford is a Scottish writer, broadcaster, and historian based in Edinburgh. The author of Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings and The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, he presents book programmes for the BBC and spent over a decade with Historic Environment Scotland. The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction (Bloomsbury, 2026) is out now in the US, with the UK edition imminent from Scribe. The New York Review of Books places him with Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Macfarlane: “Riveting.” References: •&nb...

“Our language is valuable, and we’ve gotta hold on to that. That’s the most human thing we have.” — Jeff Jarvis Last week, to celebrate episode 3,000 of the show, the New York Times’ Sam Roberts articulated the art of the obituary. Borrowing from Citizen Kane, he described it as the Rosebud method. Obits are all about life (death only figuring as an afterthought), Roberts explained, so hunt for the moment which defines that life. Today’s show is a kind of obituary of that type. Only it’s about the life of a machine and the mass media that emerged in its wake. In Hot Type, tech historian Jeff Jarvis introduces us to the magnificent late 19th century machine that not only gave birth to industrial mass media, but also bankrupted Mark Twain. It’s the history of the Linotype, the machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler that ended four hundred and fifty years of setting type, as Jarvis puts it, “one damn letter at a time.” It’s an extraordinary story. Before the Linotype, American daily newspapers were limited to a 4,000 circulation. First installed at the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886, the Linotype scaled print, thereby enabling the age of mass circulation newspapers, magazines and books. It appeared so infinitely scalable that Mark Twain poured his entire family fortune into its doomed rival, the Paige Compositor. He lost all his money, of course, making it his Rosebud moment — Citizen Twain, so to speak. But for the rest of us, Mergenthaler’s magnificent type machine was so hot that it revolutionized 20th century culture in the same way that AI is now revolutionizing 21st century reading and writing. The art of obituary. A description of life, not death. Five Takeaways •       One Damn Letter at a Time. For four hundred and fifty years after Gutenberg, virtually every word in every language was set by hand, one letter at a time — which is why the average American daily circulated just 4,000 copies, “a small Substack newsletter.” Steam-powered presses, cheap wood-pulp paper, stereotyping, and the telegraph had solved every other bottleneck; the typesetter with a composing stick was the last. More than 300 typesetting machines failed before Ottmar Mergenthaler — a Baltimore watchmaker who knew nothing about printing, prodded by James O. Clephane, once a stenographer in Lincoln’s cabinet — had the eureka: stop imitating hand-setting and mold entire lines of type at once. Installed at the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886, the Linotype made type fresh for every edition, let print catch up with the telegraph, and gave birth to mass media.•       The Union That Didn’t Smash the Machine. The book’s great labor surprise: the typesetters didn’t fight the typesetting machine. Having studied the Luddites’ defeat, the International Typographical Union sent spies into the Tribune’s composing room, concluded the Linotype was inevitable, and demanded to operate it — with Mergenthaler’s blessing. Thirty thousand jobs disappeared, returned to full strength within five years, and grew for seventy-five more, making the ITU America’s most powerful union. Then came wave two — paper tape, computers that could hyphenate and justify, cold type, PostScript — and this time the union fought: six of nine New York papers died in the strikes, Bert Powers traded automation for lifetime job guarantees (the last holder retired from the New York Times around 2012), and Murdoch’s secret Wapping plant ended Fleet Street — a century, almost exactly, after machine number one. The two lessons: take charge of the technology if you can; if it will replace you outright, find something else to do.•       The Machine That Drove Twain Mad. Mark Twain wanted to be filthy rich and stop writing — so he poured his fortune, and his wife’s family coal fortune, into the Paige Compositor, the Linotype’s brilliant, doomed rival: only two ever built, the sole survivor sitting in the basement of Hartford’s Mark Twain House looking like “a railroad with nowhere to go.” Bankruptcy followed — a far deeper shame in the nineteenth century — and Twain repaid every debtor. Jarvis reads the scars in the fiction: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ends with technology destroying technology in an Armageddon of Camelot; the unfinished No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger conjures strange beasts endlessly duplicating pages — scale itself as nightmare. He lost all his money, of course — his Rosebud moment, as Andrew puts it, borrowing from Sam Roberts’ art of the obituary on episode 3,000. The machine robbed Twain not of his humor, Jarvis concludes, but of his love of technology. The biopic pitch: Citizen Twain.•       From One Gilded Age to Another. The Linotype era bridges Twain’s Gilded Age — tycoons of steam, steel, and wire — to ours, with its barons of bits and AI. Whitelaw Reid, the book’s villain and the first capitalist media mogul, used the machine against his own union and predicted newspapers would never exceed eight pages (completely wrong); Frank Munsey invented the attention economy at a dime a copy — content as honey, audience as product, a model that ruled mass media and infected the Internet. Today’s moguls fare no better in Jarvis’s telling: Altman selling “vending machines for intelligence” that actually dispense compute, Amodei “the paragon of safety” with a skewed definition of it, all chasing the Valhalla of AGI, “pure BS.” His hope: open-weight models to check the frontier companies. His warning against banning them: guardrails are a fool’s errand — the printing press was a general machine, and nobody could tell Gutenberg to keep it from Martin Luther.•       Words Matter, Damn It. The through-line from Jarvis’s blog post to the book: language is the most human thing we have. His objection to Anthropic’s watermark isn’t Keith Teare’s shame argument — it’s that a scheme treating “overcast” and “gray” as interchangeable declares all language fungible, “a cultural statement damaging to our craft.” His own AI practice is disclosed down to a confessional footnote in Hot Type for a single borrowed phrase: Gemini may pull facts (“don’t write for me”), but what you express must be what you want to express. The typewriter shaped Nietzsche and made Hemingway; the newsroom computer made Jarvis an editor more than a writer; Quark made everyone typesetters — “in the end, it was all still me.” Against Kirschenbaum’s gray goo, he holds up Pope Leo (work brings dignity; not a Luddite) and poetry itself. Hot type revolutionized 20th century culture the way AI is now revolutionizing 21st century reading and writing. The art of obituary: a description of life, not death — and the most human thing we have is the words. About the Guest Jeff Jarvis is the Emeritus Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. The creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, he has been TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, and a media columnist for The Guardian. His books include What Would Google Do?, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Magazine, and The Web We Weave; he blogs at Buzzmachine...

“Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event.” — Congressman Jared Huffman on January 6 We’ve featured many stark warnings about the threat of American Christian nationalism from journalists, activists, and religious scholars. Today, that warning comes from inside the government. In No Prophets, Californian congressman Jared Huffman warns that the threat of Christian nationalism could destroy American democracy. Borrowing from Sinclair Lewis, Huffman argues that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. For Huffman, it’s not an abstract threat. On January 6, 2021, he watched something chillingly close to that theological nightmare unfold from his office on Capitol Hill. The attempted coup was a religious event, he insists. The insurrectionists were radicalized by the New Apostolic Reformation. These fanatics had rooms at the Willard beside Giuliani’s war room, and they preached and prophesied as the riot unfolded. His Republican colleague Adam Kinzinger tells him Christian nationalism “wasn’t just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” And yet the 845-page select committee report ignores this story because, Huffman charges, Liz Cheney personally intervened to erase it. “We are less safe today because of it,” he says. Like so many critics of Christian nationalism, Huffman had a religious upbringing. He grew up devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and then was ordained into its priesthood before losing his faith at twenty after his father’s death. Today he is a self-described “humanist,” the co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only member of Congress who admits to not believing in gods. It’s an American intellectual tradition, he insists, that he shares with fellow religious skeptics like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party, Jared Huffman insists, are now one and the same. Huffman might not believe in gods, but there’s a biblical quality to his apocalyptic warnings. The prophet of No Prophets is putting all that religious training to good secular use. Five Takeaways •       January 6 Was a Religious Event. The book’s foundational claim, witnessed from Huffman’s Capitol Hill office: the insurrection was saturated with religious choreography — symbols, worship services, self-declared prophets exhorting the crowd. The mob was radicalized by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation, a virulent Christian supremacist movement committed to dominion by any means necessary; organizers held rooms at the Willard Hotel beside Giuliani’s war room, were tasked by the Trump campaign with mobilizing right-wing Christians, and preached and prophesied on-site as the riot unfolded. The Smithsonian’s Uncivil Religion exhibit documented it in real time, and Adam Kinzinger told Huffman that Christian nationalism “wasn’t just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” Yet the select committee’s 845-page report contains none of it — erased, Huffman charges, by Liz Cheney’s personal intervention. “We are less safe today because of it.”•       The Endgame Is Theocracy. Trump and the movement are codependent: he mainstreamed fringe prophets into White House VIPs; they supplied mobilization power nothing else in American politics can match, and wrapped him in the “Cyrus anointing” — the mythology of a flawed pagan king used by God to save his chosen people. The Washington operation is Huffman’s “shadow theocracy”: Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries runs Bible studies teaching officeholders that God opposes taxes and the regulatory state but is keenly interventionist about the bedroom; Speaker Mike Johnson — who preaches “biblically sanctioned government,” rejects church-state separation outright, joined pre-January 6 prayer calls, and architected the legal effort to overturn 2020 — sits second in line to the presidency. Kinzinger’s joke lands hard: the American Taliban. Are the Drollingers grifters or believers? Both, says Huffman — the two have never been mutually exclusive.•       Atwood Wasn’t Writing Fiction. Huffman found The Handmaid’s Tale chilling precisely because Atwood didn’t invent Gilead — she reverse-engineered it from America’s puritanical past and theocratic subcultures, and had it arrive gradually, through fake emergencies. The trad-wife future is already drafted: Pete Hegseth belongs to the TheoBros — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, led by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who says the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake and men should vote for the household — while radical traditionalist Catholics dream of a pre-Vatican II world of veils and submission. And don’t try joking with any of them, Huffman warns: in this absolutist theology, opponents aren’t adversaries but demons and antichrists, and destroying what stands in the way is a religious duty.•       A Born-Again Atheist from the Mormon Priesthood. The messenger’s unlikely arc: raised devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Independence, Missouri (now the progressive Community of Christ), ordained into its priesthood, then unmoored at twenty by his father’s death and the questions faith couldn’t answer. He settled on humanism — a moral framework without the supernatural — and calls himself a Christ-loving atheist, fully at peace with the Sermon on the Mount. His lineage, he argues, is the founding itself: Jefferson ridiculing “priestcraft,” Franklin’s lightning rod denounced by clerics who preferred sprinkling holy water from church towers, Paine and Madison beside them — and the Constitution’s secular firewall, Article VI and the First Amendment, as America’s original gift to the world. He’s politely skeptical of Jonathan Rauch’s suggestion that today’s LDS church models pluralism: “they’ve got a long way to go.”•       A Golden Opportunity — If Democrats Dare. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party “are now one and the same,” Huffman argues — which means religious liberty, pluralism, and the majority who want no theocracy have been surrendered to whichever Democrat dares claim them. Most don’t: the intersection of religion and politics strikes them as too dicey. Texas’s James Talarico is the breakthrough messenger — calling out Christian nationalism from inside the faith, addressing atheists and believers alike — while AOC, a great friend, conspicuously declines every Freethought Caucus invitation, and Newsom awaits his copy of the book. Huffman wants no constitutional amendments: the founders got it right, and the task is defending Article VI and the Establishment Clause from a Supreme Court reading them out of existence. His own ambitions? “Career-limited as a straight white male from Northern California. I’m good with that.” About the Guest Jared Huffman has represented California’s 2nd congressional district — from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border — since 2013. A seven-term Democrat, former environmental attorney, co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only Humanist ever to serve in Congress, he watched the January 6 insurrection from...

“Anthropic will be a $3 trillion company, SpaceX $2 trillion, and OpenAI $1 to $1.5 trillion by Q2 of next year.” — Dave McClure Yesterday, Keith Teare and I debated the circularity of the AI economy. Today, two of Silicon Valley’s most experienced investors, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee, not only straighten out this supposed “circularity” but also burst the pessimism bubble that envelops so many conversations about AI. Verjee is not only McClure’s partner at Practical Venture Capital, but also the author of the newly published A Brief History of Financial Bubbles. According to him, today’s AI-stoked economy is not an unusually large bubble. It may not even be a bubble, given that AI revenue — from Anthropic’s $70 billion to OpenAI’s $50 billion — is real. The irrational exuberance lives elsewhere — in companies “draping themselves in AI magic sauce” and in the “SaaSpocalypse” that is decimating software-as-a-service companies. They are both bullish about our AI future. McClure predicts that by the first half of next year, Anthropic and OpenAI will have joined SpaceX as public companies. Together, these three AI darlings will be worth $7 trillion. That’s seven thousand billion reasons to be optimistic about 2027. Five Takeaways •       Not a Bubble — a Repricing. Both partners reject the bubble call, on the numbers: Anthropic at roughly $70 billion in revenue on under two gigawatts of compute, OpenAI at $40–50 billion, SpaceX guiding to $100 billion with more than half from AI — real revenue, increasingly real profits. The froth is specific: companies “draping themselves in AI magic sauce” without the substance, and the SaaSpocalypse — cloud-software companies whose cash flows are suddenly perceived as far less durable as AI encroaches on design, legal, and medical verticals. Michael Burry’s warning gets Aman’s definitive treatment (“he’s called nine of the last two bubbles”), and the Aschenbrenner blowup was leverage — running four-x in volatile chip stocks — not AI: he kept his Anthropic position, is married to Dario’s chief of staff, and “will be just fine.”•       The $2 Trillion Filing. The week’s news, baked into the episode: Anthropic has filed to go public, with a very intentionally leaked $2 trillion valuation hinging on a $190–200 billion 2028 revenue forecast — which Dave suspects is conservative. Eight months ago, when these two last visited, the show was about Elon and Sam and Dario was the bit player; then came the weeks when decades happen: Anthropic’s bet on coding agents — reportedly inspired by watching Cursor — captured the revenue engine of the entire application layer. Aman’s sequencing: SpaceX is absorbing $75–85 billion of IPO capital, Anthropic goes next, and if both trade well, 2026 breaks every record for money raised — leaving 2027 for OpenAI at a $100 billion revenue guide. Google, he reminds us, went fourth after Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite: better to do it right than to do it first.•       The Fastest Pivot in Corporate History. Dave’s account of SpaceX’s transformation: the $250 billion xAI merger (a largely private transaction Elon approved with himself), the acquisition of Cursor that closed Friday, Colossus data centers scaling from two gigawatts toward ten, and compute deals renting capacity to Anthropic and Google — former competitors — all executed in roughly six months. The S-1, with unprecedented forward projections of $300 billion in annual revenue, mentions artificial intelligence over 1,100 times (“I used AI to count it,” Aman admits). The result is an economy Andrew calls incestuous: SpaceX’s valuation now rests on Anthropic’s progress. On Elon himself, Dave separates the art from the artist — terrific products, dubious politics — and on OpenAI: more board changes than Spinal Tap had drummers, a team still storming and norming, but Sam is savvy and the IPO lands by Q2 next year at $1–1.5 trillion.•       Circularity as Asset Class. The New York Times sees a vulnerability in tech giants funding their own customers; Aman, a former CFO at eBay and Sonos, sees asset-backed finance. His analogy: buying a Corvette with GMAC financing isn’t a conspiracy as long as the terms are commercially reasonable — and NVIDIA’s $500 billion backstop, syndicated with Goldman Sachs, Apollo, Brookfield, and KKR, brings third-party money that validates the asset. GPUs, he argues, are cars rather than smartphones: financeable over eight to ten years, not obsolete in three. The red flags to watch are rebates and self-dealing on non-commercial terms; the current evidence looks more like aircraft leasing than Enron. Dave’s deeper worry isn’t the AI economy at all — it’s the national deficit, whose interest payments are now the largest single line item in the federal budget.•       The Luddite Summer Meets the Long Boom. Aman’s sharpest historical observation: this may be the first technological revolution whose leaders are the doomers — Sam prophesying idleness, Dario predicting half of entry-level white-collar jobs destroyed within five years (already wrong at eighteen months, with no 10–20 percent unemployment in sight). Against the WSJ’s jobless-boom and nation-of-Luddites anxieties, the book offers the long view: of ten historical bubbles, the two positive ones — Britain’s 1845 railway mania and America’s 1997–2000 internet boom — overbuilt, crashed, and left the world a valuable technology. Buy every stock founded in the boom and hold, and you’d have owned NVIDIA, Amazon, Google, and PayPal. The 1970s wiped out four to six million secretarial jobs in a decade; women’s participation rose from 52 to 77 percent. And on China, the free-trader’s answer: partners in progress — there’s more to gain than lose if we do this right. About the Guests Dave McClure and Aman Verjee are the co-founders and managing partners of Practical Venture Capital, a Silicon Valley firm specializing in venture secondaries. Dave founded 500 Startups, invested at Founders Fund, and ran marketing at PayPal; Aman was COO of 500 Startups, led strategy at PayPal and eBay, served as CFO of Sonos and of eBay’s North American marketplace — and wrote the first draft of PayPal’s S-1. Aman’s new book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles (out this week), is available at bigbubbletrouble.com. References: •       A Brief History of Financial Bubbles by Aman Verjee — ten manias from the tulips to the subprime crash, out this week at bigbubbletrouble.com.•       Reuters on Anthropic’s IPO filing — the $2 trillion valuation and the $190–200 billion 2028 revenue forecast it hinges on.•       “The Summer That America Became a Nation of Luddites” and the “jobless boom” — the Wall Street Journal pieces threading this week’s episodes.•       The New York Times on tech giants’ circular AI economy — the piece that framed yesterday’s TWTW debate and today’s rebuttal.•       The SpaceX S-1 — forward projections of $300 billion in ann...

“I don’t feel any shame at all recruiting an army of AI agents to help me accomplish my goals. But I think society is trying to make me feel shame.” — Keith Teare Welcome to the summer of America’s luddite discontent. Not only are left and right calling for an AI ban, but tech loathing has even infiltrated Silicon Valley in the form of Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output. That, at least, is the view of That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, who believes that watermarking is “nuts.” In our luddite zeitgeist, Keith believes that a watermark is a scarlet stamp of implied guilt. By marking its own product, Anthropic is not only furnishing the luddite mob with a convenient surveillance tool, but also acknowledging a tacit guilt about using Claude. “You should never adjust to the market,” the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur explains. “The market’s wrong nine times out of ten.” As for Dario Amodei, Claude’s dad (so to speak), Keith is even more accusatory. The Anthropic CEO is kissing ass “like a politician, not the leader of a company,” Keith hisses, repeating this week’s whispers that Anthropic is becoming an “ideologically motivated cult.” If Dario were female, Keith would probably make him a witch. Or, at least, a hussy — the hysterical implication, if not the word, of the Journal’s profile of Cami Clark, Dario’s wife. I took Anthropic’s side — somebody had to. I see watermarking as just another AI tool. It’s an honest human fingerprint in an age of fakery. Live by the algorithm, die by it too. Anyway, a watermark has its uses. Rather than moral opprobrium, it feeds our curiosity about who is and isn’t using AI. So, for example, I ran Keith’s editorial through another AI detector and it indicated 86 percent AI-generated while mine came back as 100 percent human. And if I can elude the scarlet stamp, then even I might have to join the luddite mob. Five Takeaways •       “Watermarking Is Nuts.” Keith’s editorial takes aim at Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output — invisible text signals identifying the machine’s hand, cousin to what Google has long done with audio. His objection isn’t the mark itself (“I don’t care that it’s watermarked. I care that Anthropic thinks it should be watermarked”): a watermark starts from suspicion, implies a problem where none exists, and tells Anthropic’s own customers their use of the product needs flagging. Restream doesn’t watermark this show; Adobe doesn’t watermark its exports. To Keith it’s pure zeitgeist capitulation — and while one Claude Max subscriber in the newsletter canceled in protest, Keith hasn’t. Andrew’s rebuttal: watermarking serves curiosity, and in an age of fakery an honest fingerprint is a very human addition.•       The Scarlet Watermark: On AI Shame. The deeper argument was theological. Keith — an atheist who concedes atheism is also a faith, and who believes in good and bad but not sin — feels no shame “recruiting an army of AI agents” so long as he can stand by the output; shame belongs to spam factories and fakers who publish unread. But society, he says, is trying to make him feel it: the canceled author who lost his agent last week proves there’s an issue. Andrew, playing therapist, diagnosed a flicker of guilt anyway — and argued shame is precisely the point: one of the last all-too-human spaces, worth preserving in an age of machines. Both then confessed their methods on air: Pangram scored Keith’s editorial 86 percent AI and Andrew’s 100 percent human. “I’m a clever cheater. You’re a less clever cheater.” Keith: “There’s no shame in that.”•       Keith vs Dario. Keith’s indictment of Anthropic’s CEO was the week’s harshest: Dario Amodei “kisses ass… like a politician, not the leader of a company,” keeps taking the media’s bait, and is “damaging his chances over and over again” in a $2 trillion IPO year — cult whispers included. The right posture, per Keith: never adjust to the market (“wrong nine times out of ten”); do what Elon would do and call bullshit. Andrew’s defense: he’s a fan of Dario, certainly next to Elon and Slippery Sam — and if America really is a nation of Luddites, adjusting is what reality requires. His actual grievance is more prosaic: $100 a month and he’s out of credits, as both Anthropic and OpenAI squeeze revenue for the IPO race. Keith, meanwhile, spent the week testing Grok Bot — a “far better” OpenClaw replacement at $200 a month — and declared himself, this week at least, a Grok Bot guy: “I’m for sale, actually.”•       The Luddite Summer Reading List. The Wall Street Journal declared this the summer America became a nation of Luddites — left and right, with a January 6 organizer now rallying conservatives against AI. Noah Smith diagnosed the poverty of anti-tech thought: tech’s power is persuasion, not coercion, and the iPhone won its argument on day one (Andrew dissents — society never got to discuss the iPhone’s impact). Martin Wolf, reviewing Daron Acemoglu’s new defense of liberal democracy, concluded the ship has sailed: liberal democracy was unthinkable without industrial capitalism, and that age is vanishing. Keith’s gloss is optimistic — the eroding factory life frees individuals for self-realization. Andrew’s snapshot from deindustrialized Indianapolis, and Britain’s twenty percent on disability, says otherwise. Keith’s concession, extracted twice for the record: “You’re right.”•       Unicorns, Circles — and Two IPOs. Keith listened to Andrew’s Renée Jones interview and rated it good — but says she misses the why: overnight global distribution to five billion phones, freemium economics, and rational revenue multiples made unicorns inevitable; to stop them “she’d have to deglobalize the world.” (Andrew’s verdict: “a nicer, smarter version of Lina Khan.” Keith’s question for Democrats: where is your argument for embracing AI?) The New York Times’ circularity warning — tech giants’ profits propped by their own AI investments — got the Grok Bot treatment: hundreds of billions in external revenue make it a Channel Tunnel, not a closed loop, though Andrew noted Keith told the bot the answer first. Illiquid shares carry provisional, not realized, value. And the ending both agreed on: the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are this narrative’s climax. Keith will personally buy both. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “Why Watermark?”•  ...

“The machines today are like toddlers learning how to walk. They stumble. They’re not very good. They make mistakes.” — Anmol Madan One in three American adults are already using AI for health information — with or without their doctors’ permission. The machines, in other words, are already seeing us. This will chill some Americans in our summer of luddite discontent. For others, however, like the San Francisco-based medical tech entrepreneur Anmol Madan, the appearance of doctor AI in our lives is mostly good news. In his new book, The Machines Will See You Now, Madan lays out what he calls a “human roadmap” to “autonomous health care.” I’m not entirely sure what he means by “human” in a Blade Runner-style world where machine and man are quickly merging. But by “autonomous,” which I suspect is a euphemism, Madan means artificial intelligence. What worries Madan about our current moment is the broken dialogue over AI. On the one hand, we have tech utopians promising a totally automated healthcare industry. Then we have an anxious establishment struggling to change America’s archaic and often dysfunctional medical system. And, of course, American consumers (if that’s the right word) who are already using ChatGPT or, more troublingly, TikTok, as their doctor. America spends $4.7 trillion on a healthcare industry which compares poorly with the medical systems of other wealthy countries. Madan’s “parallel universe,” he promises, would cost half as much and double access. The machines will see you now. Like it or not, Dr AI is our all-too-human future. Five Takeaways •       One in Three Already Ask the Machines. The KFF poll behind the episode: a third of American adults already use AI for health information, with or without their doctors’ blessing — and if they’re not asking ChatGPT, they’re asking TikTok. Madan’s frustration is the broken dialogue between AI exuberance (“we’re going to automate healthcare”) and medical anxiety, when the right answer is in between: new technology is no excuse for throwing out the guardrails of medical devices and clinical safety. The stakes are the brutal arithmetic of American medicine — $4.7 trillion spent for the worst outcomes among peer nations — and his “parallel universe”: half the cost, twice the access, delivered by AI systems that are tested, safe, and rigorous. Consumer appetite is already there; the safeguards are not.•       The Waymo Scale for Medicine. The book’s organizing framework applies the self-driving industry’s levels of autonomy to healthcare. Level zero is today: 99 percent of decisions — diagnosis, treatment, prescription — made by humans. Level one is doctor assistance, already deployed: radiologists who once hauled backpacks of reports now guided by machines to where to focus. Levels two and three ease machines into the lowest-stakes treatment and diagnostic decisions with human review — and the fully autonomous end state, Madan concedes, may never arrive. To Andrew’s objection that Waymo’s scale ended with the drivers removed, Madan offers the transatlantic pilot: autopilot flies ninety percent of the route, and nobody thinks the pilot doesn’t matter. The structure, he argues, is what lets regulators, doctors, and builders finally talk about the same thing.•       Toddlers Learning to Walk. Madan’s metaphor for today’s medical AI: toddlers — stumbling, error-prone, needing layers of protection, and badly underestimated at their peril and ours. The mistake, he argues, is concluding that because the systems aren’t perfect we shouldn’t try them at all, when a constrained system is starving for capacity. Pressed by Andrew on what the machines will never do (“toddlers grow up”), his list is candid: human perception — reading body language, assessing the person who walks into the clinic — improves far more slowly than diagnostic reasoning and may never reach human capacity; and the relationships people form with chatbots, loneliness epidemic notwithstanding, have no literature yet showing they produce clinical outcomes like a human therapist’s thirty minutes. Plus one asterisk on the machines’ famous exam results: we grade them on human benchmarks, and machines fail differently than humans do.•       The Behavior-Change Trillion. Of America’s $4.7 trillion, a full trillion is the behavior-change problem — the eating, drinking, smoking, and sitting that no pamphlet has ever fixed. Andrew’s objection: nobody needs an MIT degree to know they should exercise, so why would a machine’s nagging beat a doctor’s? Madan’s answer is the space between visits: patients leave the office motivated and fall off within days, and personalized systems — like those he built for tens of millions at his previous companies — learn what actually moves each individual: this one walks more but won’t change diet, that one needs the stress addressed first, another needs the language and cultural register matched. Not one-size-fits-all “eat healthy,” but friction removed person by person, programmatically, at a scale no human workforce could staff. Andrew’s rejoinder: in an age of ubiquitous AI slop, the exercise reminder may be deleted as exactly that.•       Priceless. On trust, Andrew invoked the neighbors: Slippery Sam Altman, the mistrusted AI giants, and entrepreneurs — RadiantGraph included — getting rich while asking for our bloodwork. Madan’s counsel is unexpected caution: in the AI era all data matters, healthcare data most of all, and it belongs on healthcare-specific, HIPAA-bound platforms — not pasted into general chatbots. He concedes San Francisco’s mansions-and-homelessness inequity (he advises New York City’s Department of Public Health and wants to help at home), but defends the Bay Area as the place where the PC, the iPhone, the web, and now AI actually happened — Jeff Dean announced his next act the morning they recorded. And the bot test: how would he prove he’s human? “I’m quite flawed, and I’m often wrong. An AI avatar of Anmol probably wouldn’t be as wrong as I sometimes am.” Fittingly priceless — which is what Anmol means in Sanskrit. About the Guest Anmol Madan is a healthcare entrepreneur and computer scientist, and the founder and CEO of RadiantGraph, an AI platform helping health plans and healthcare organizations deliver proactive care. An MIT Media Lab PhD who worked on the first generation of wearables, he founded Ginger, the pioneering AI tele-psychiatry company later acquired by Headspace, and served as Chief Data Scientist at Livongo and as a data and AI executive at Teladoc Health. He advises the New York City Department of Public Health and lives in San Francisco. The Machines Will See You Now: A Human Roadmap to Autonomous Health Care (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 1, 2026) is his first book. References: •       The Machines Will See You Now: A Human Roadmap to Autonomous Health Care by Anmol Madan (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 1, 2026). Alex Pentland, MIT: “A critical read about AI in he...

“The Romans did that many, many times — until normal had changed so radically that there was nothing left of the republic to protect.” — Michelle Berenfeld on getting “back to normal” Are we Rome (yet)? Michelle Berenfeld fears we are. Back in April of last year, the professor of classics at Pitzer College published “The Roman Way to Trash a Republic” in the Atlantic. And now Berenfeld has expanded her argument into Lessons from a Lost Republic, a new book about what Ancient Rome can teach us about our current American moment. There are two Romes, Berenfeld reminds us: the Roman Republic and Imperial Rome. Nostalgic tech guys like Mark Zuckerberg are obsessed with the imperial world of emperors, legions, and world domination, while the more forward-thinking founders of the American republic used imperial figures like Caesar and Augustus as negative lessons from antiquity. Asking whether Trump is Roman is like asking whether the Pope is Catholic. Certainly he’s a wannabe Caesar with his fleshy face on our currency, his imperial DC arch, his daily wars, and all those fake blood sports on the White House lawn. But the daily comedy show misses the longer-term political tragedy. Berenfeld fears the shift in power from Congress toward an imperial presidency, a trend she says predates Trump and will outlast him. The gravest Roman conceit was believing, after each crisis, that things could get “back to normal” — a mantra Roman citizens repeated endlessly until there was nothing left of the old republic to protect. Then there’s Zuckerberg, who even named his daughters August and Aurelia. For Zuck, Augustus should be praised for doing “tough things” to usher in two centuries of peace and prosperity. But Berenfeld reminds us those tough things included drawing up enemies lists and killing everyone who crossed him. Meanwhile, this supposed peace and prosperity (de)generated the rule of Caligula and Nero. Augustus, Berenfeld argues, was one of history’s great spin doctors, claiming to be restoring a corrupted republic while simultaneously dismantling it. No wonder, perhaps, Zuckerberg admires him so much. Berenfeld says that the Roman spectacle of “bread and circuses” should be a warning. Juvenal’s complaint was that Romans traded their liberties for gladiatorial games and free grain. We’re making the same trade in contemporary America, Berenfeld observes, and getting neither. Most Americans, she concludes sadly, can’t even afford a World Cup ticket. Berenfeld’s deepest lesson is about power and political agency. Political powers given up are not easily gotten back, she warns. Republics are not saved by Hollywood-style saviors, and there is no golden age to restore. That said, the Los Angeles-based classicist hasn’t completely given up hope. Nothing about Rome’s trajectory was inevitable, she reminds us. Remixing Benjamin Franklin, the American Republic is ours to keep, if we use our agency as citizens. Just don’t tempt fate by naming your daughters August and Aurelia. Five Takeaways •       The Founders’ Rome vs the Bros’ Rome. Americans are obsessed with the wrong Rome. The TikTok meme, the billionaires, and the manosphere celebrate the empire — emperors, legions, gladiators, world domination — while the founders admired the republic: 500 years of government founded on the rejection of a king, with rule of law, guaranteed rights, and peaceful transitions of power, all rare in antiquity. They designed the American constitution in explicit dialogue with Rome’s collapse, asking “what if someone like Sulla or Caesar got this position?” — and regarded the men the bros now worship as usurpers and dictators. Polybius’ mixed constitution — part monarchy (consuls), part aristocracy (Senate), part democracy (assemblies) — became their template of checks and balances. A republic, as Franklin warned, if you can keep it.•       On the Nose — and Beside the Point. Trump’s Romanism is almost comical: his face on coins, a triumphal arch, blood sport performed on the White House lawn. But Berenfeld’s book — which she didn’t want to be about Trump at all — argues the real Roman echo is structural: a Senate voluntarily handing its powers to one man, a trend that predates Trump and will outlast him. The gravest error is the “back to normal” fallacy: after each crisis, the Romans told themselves the republic had survived and things could return to normal — many, many times, until normal had shifted so radically that there was nothing left to protect. America’s dichotomy of denial and despair repeats it: blaming everything on one president gives cover to everyone else who is ceding, normalizing, and waiting for the storm to pass.•       Bread, Circuses — and Neither. Juvenal’s famous sneer, decoded: the circuses were amphitheater games staged sometimes every other day; the bread was a grain allotment for every Roman citizen — in effect, Berenfeld notes, a minimum basic income, something our politics would call socialism. The Roman people traded their liberties and their republic for that package. Americans, she argues, are making the same trade and receiving neither the bread nor the circuses — no basic income, and most people can’t afford a World Cup ticket. The party structure rhymes too: the populares and the optimates were both parties of very rich men competing for a few powerful positions, and eventually they looked alike to ordinary Romans — much as America’s two parties have begun to look alike to ordinary Americans.•       Marcus Aurelius Was Writing His Memoirs. Every American man Berenfeld meets brings up Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations contain genuine wisdom — thoughtful action, the equal shortness of all lives — but context deflates the cult: it was the private journal of an elderly emperor, written in Greek (the language of philosophy, not of his soldiers), barely read in antiquity and rediscovered much later. “It’s a little bit like when George Bush started making paintings.” Andrew’s Arendtian reading — stoicism as the inward turn of men whose empire had abolished politics — hangs over the manosphere’s version. And the one way she wishes Trump were more Roman: the engineering. Roman concrete got stronger underwater; on the reflecting-pool problem in DC, “if I were an ancient Roman, I could tell him — I’ve got a guy.”•       Powers Given Up Are Not Easily Gotten Back. The book’s core warning: when a legislature grants one man powers beyond his office — always in the name of crisis — those powers stick to the office long after the man is gone, and no savior restores them. Lincoln and FDR stretched their bounds and let go afterwards (or died, as Andrew noted; she conceded). Berenfeld refuses the fascism debate — Mussolini cast himself as a new Augustus, and 1930s historians bought the story — offering a sharper test instead: would you give these powers to a president whose politics you oppose? Nero’s fiddle was posthumous PR; an emperor’s reputation depends on his successor, which makes the augury of a President Vance worth watching. Nothing was inevitable — not Augustus, not Christianity, not the fall. Political agency is...

 “He’s not a trustworthy witness to his own story. Everything is ten times bigger and better than it really was — except when he was accused of crimes, in which case he can’t really remember anymore.” — Joby Warrick on Carlos the Jackal Yesterday, WOLA’s Adam Isacson and John Walsh described how the US government has appropriated the term “narco-terrorism” to justify their Latin American killing spree. Today, we talk the real thing. Pulitzer Prize-winning Joby Warrick has a new book out about the rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal, who he calls the “original super-terrorist.” So who was Carlos the Jackal? Originally he was named by his Venezuelan Marxist father Ilich in homage to Lenin. Then he renamed himself Carlos, borrowing from a fake passport the French police happened to find in 1975. While The Jackal came from the London Guardian after reporters spotted Frederick Forsyth’s best-seller on the bookshelf of his London safe house. Ilich (i.e. Carlos) loved it. Anything for attention. Especially from the capitalist media. His career, as a proxy Palestinian terrorist, was equally audacious. His solo debut, at 24, was the attempted London assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff. Two years later, Carlos waltzed into OPEC headquarters in Vienna and kidnapped most of the world’s oil ministers, a terrorist heist that, Warrick reveals, was financed by Muammar Gaddafi. Then all of Carlos’ yesterdays — and there are many, as Warrick discovers when he interviews him in his French jail. He spent twenty years on the run, mostly barely camouflaged in faded Eastern European hotels. The Mossad didn’t even consider him worth assassinating. By the eighties he had become a gun for hire who’d stopped attacking Israelis. And at 75, in his convent-turned-prison outside Paris, the world’s original super-terrorist cooks his own meals, repeats old leftist slogans, and misremembers everything except his innocence. In spite of his pathetic fate, Carlos matters because, as Warrick notes, the Jackal model is back in fashion. Russia and Iran now hire petty crooks on Telegram for a few hundred dollars to firebomb synagogues or assassinate dissidents. Gaza’s tragic hopelessness echoes the post-1967 conditions that bred the first wave of Palestinian terror. Social media is now infested with wannabe violent influencers. The day of the Jackal, then, is not only our history but also our future. Five Takeaways •       Interview with the Jackal. Warrick negotiated for over a year — with Carlos, then with a French government determined he not be glorified, since his gravest crimes were against French citizens — for roughly ninety minutes in March 2025, no recorder, no camera, notebook only. The prison is a converted sixteenth-century convent outside Paris where the Nazis once tortured members of the Resistance; inside it, Carlos remains the big man on campus — guards call him Carlos, not Ilich, and he keeps a large cell, cooks his own meals, and browses the internet. At 75 he is natty, polyglot, charming — and stooped, forgetful, repeating himself into what Warrick calls a fog of old memories. As a witness he is worthless: everything ten times bigger and better than it was, except the crimes, which he suddenly cannot recall.•       Ilich, Carlos, Jackal: An Accidental Brand. His ardent-Marxist father named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin, after the founder of the Soviet Union. “Carlos” came from a fake passport — Carlos Martinez — that French police happened to seize in 1975; the pudgy dark-glasses photo the world memorized was a passport fake he remains embarrassed by. “The Jackal” was coined by the British tabloids after reporters prowling his London safe house spotted Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal on the bookshelf. He embraced all of it: a true believer whose slogans still pour out in prison, welded to a massive ego that always placed Carlos at the center of the revolution. Had Instagram existed, Warrick agrees, he’d have used it — the pre-digital influencer, with the world’s press as his platform.•       From Five Bullets to Kidnapping OPEC. His 1970 baptism of fire in the Black September fighting hardened him past the point of return; his solo test, at 24, was the attempted assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff — an old gun, five bullets, a jam, and a bullet deflected by the victim’s teeth (“good old Milk Marketing Board,” Sieff told the BBC from his hospital bed). The masterpiece came in December 1975: a 26-year-old walks into OPEC’s Vienna headquarters mid-conference, takes the world’s oil ministers hostage, extracts a plane and a ransom, and flies them to North Africa — the most audacious terrorist act Warrick can name. The book’s scoop settles who sponsored it: not Saddam Hussein, as biographers and a 2010 docudrama claimed, but Muammar Gaddafi — the autocrat pioneering the criminal proxy with no return address.•       Twenty Years, No Capture — and a Mossad Pass. The world’s most wanted man spent two decades in comfort: Budapest his favorite hideout (good meals, nice hotels — Carlos insisted on top-flight everything), the Hungarians, East Germans, and Romanians almost proud to host their superstar guest, Assad’s Syria always available. The run ended only when the Bloc fell and the Arab states tired of him; the French and Americans finally tracked him to Khartoum in 1994. The great deflation is the Mossad: they never bothered with him. His mentor Wadi Haddad — the true operational genius — they hunted and killed; Carlos, by then a mercenary who’d stopped attacking Israelis, simply fell down the priority list. The world’s most fearsome terrorist wasn’t worth Israel’s effort.•       The Return of Violent Chaos. Warrick’s closing argument, and the reason this history is news: the Gaddafi model has been rediscovered. Russia and Iran now hire criminals — recruited on Telegram, paid a few hundred dollars in crypto — to throw grenades into synagogues, set fires, and assassinate dissidents: hundreds of incidents already, most under the radar, none traceable to Moscow or Tehran. The modern Carlos works for whoever pays; ideology has left the business entirely. Gaza’s hopelessness, meanwhile, mirrors the post-1967 despair that launched the first international terror wave — and we are not prepared. As for America’s own extrajudicial turn, from drone war to boat strikes: “There’s no precedent... it is a grave change for us as Americans. Very troubling to me.” About the Guest Joby Warrick is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran national security correspondent for The Washington Post. His books include The Triple Agent, Red Line, and Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist (Scribner, August 18, 2026), built on newly declassified archives, secret police files, and a rare interview with Carlos himself, is out next week.

“Each one of these is individually a crime scene, and the United States is the responsible actor.” — John Walsh With America preoccupied (as always) with war in the Middle East, another kind of killing is taking place at its back door. Since early September of last year, the United States military has bombed 67 small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and assassinated 221 supposed “narco-terrorists.” The first full account of this deadly war is the Washington Office on Latin America’s (WOLA) Killing Spree: Extrajudicial Executions in the U.S. Boat Strike Campaign, a 27,000-word report by Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director for defense oversight, and John Walsh, its director for drug policy. Under U.S. and international law, this is murder, Isacson and Walsh conclude about a policy they see as premeditated killing of civilians who pose no immediate threat to the United States. Its official name is Operation Southern Spear, designed as a war on terror by an inner circle of Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. So the Donroe Doctrine is really a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings. Trump might be able to point to Latin America on a map, but this official US policy is about far more than geography. And it even fails as drug policy. The boat strikes target Andean cocaine while fentanyl (produced in Mexico from Chinese synthetics) drives the American epidemic. As Isacson puts it, bombing these boats is like murdering a street-corner dealer and declaring the entire drug problem solved. The WOLA report’s darkest implication is domestic. The Justice Department memo underpinning the campaign amounts, Walsh argues, to an open license to kill. For an administration that talks obsessively about the enemy within, the boat strikes might be a dress rehearsal. Graham Greene’s quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans. Only this time they’re filming their own atrocities and boasting about them on social media. The assassination of that street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota. America’s southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door. Five Takeaways •       63 Crime Scenes. The numbers, from WOLA’s strike-by-strike tracker: 63 attacks on 67 boats since September 2, 2025; 221 people killed; three known survivors. The legal analysis is not complicated: Title 18, Section 1111 of the U.S. Code prohibits murder, applies on the high seas, and premeditated killing of civilians with no self-defense justification is precisely what it forbids — no due process, no evidence offered, and in many cases no idea who was aboard. Each announcement is a near-identical Southern Command tweet, which is exactly what makes the campaign insidious: with no news handle, coverage shrinks to 150 words in the AP, and a democracy grows numb to what Walsh insists on calling 63 individual crime scenes with the United States as the responsible actor.•       Narcoterrorism: Two Wars Welded Together. Operation Southern Spear fuses the post-9/11 war on terror with the sixty-year war on drugs: organized-crime groups redefined as the equivalent of al-Qaeda and ISIS, a secret list of two dozen designated organizations, and Stephen Miller declaring that only the military can fight drug trafficking. The policy’s continuity is real — supply control has been an American staple since Reagan — but its rupture is stark: Marco Rubio’s own justification admitted that decades of interdiction never worked, so the administration would skip the intermediary steps and simply kill. The December 2025 National Security Strategy makes Latin America a first-tier priority for the first time in decades — the Donroe Doctrine, which Andrew reads as a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings — with Venezuela as proof of concept and “joint operations” as the export: Mexico refused, Ecuador agreed, and newly elected far-right governments in Colombia and Peru may soon invite American special forces to kick in doors.•       The Wrong War on the Wrong Economy. Both authors concede the underlying problem is real: organized crime kills, displaces, extorts everyone from street peddlers to five-star restaurants, and buys governments wholesale. But the strikes fail on their own terms. They target Andean cocaine while fentanyl — compact, potent, made in Mexico from Chinese precursors — drives American overdose deaths. Drugs are one income stream among many: at $4,000-an-ounce gold, illegal mining that poisons the Amazon may pay better, alongside extortion, kidnapping, and migrant smuggling. And the military is the wrong tool: America’s supermax already holds the drug lords, the Medellín and Cali cartels were obliterated decades ago, and there is more coca than ever — because organized crime, unlike an insurgency, doesn’t want to fight the state. It wants to corrupt it. Killing suspects also destroys the evidence a real case would need — ludicrous, as Walsh puts it, as drug policy.•       Who Were the 221? Nobody knows how many were innocent — which is itself the scandal. From the few dozen cases WOLA could document, the dead include fishermen, migrants, human-trafficking victims, and kids paid a couple hundred dollars to run drugs or fuel one time — the lowest links in the chain, in coastal regions where boats are the only roads and the same vessel carries passengers one day and a small cargo the next. (Isacson has ridden boats exactly like the ones in the videos.) One victim was a genuinely dirty local drug boss; most were nothing of the kind. The reckoning has begun at the edges: two Trinidadian families are suing the United States in Boston federal court, a Colombian fisherman’s family has gone to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and an Ecuadorian prosecutor who investigated the strikes has been assassinated.•       Colombia or Chicago. The report’s most chilling section reads the Justice Department’s legal memo as an open license to kill: a secret list, membership decided by the president, no limiting factor — so that, as Walsh warns, “it doesn’t matter if you’re in Colombia or Chicago.” For an administration that speaks constantly of the enemy from within — and drummed the theme into the assembled brass at Quantico — the high seas look like a rehearsal space. Accountability remains possible: Tim Kaine is reading every after-action report, boat-flag states could take Trump officials to the International Criminal Court, and travel could get complicated for the inner circle. WOLA’s fear isn’t retribution but lawfare — never, as Isacson says, a reason to be silent. Graham Greene’s quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans, filming their own atrocities and boasting on social media. The assassination of a street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota: America’s southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door. The report is free online. Read it. About the Guests 

“Obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived. Death only figures in one sentence.” — Sam Roberts This is, remarkably, episode 3,000 of Keen On America — three thousand conversations since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010. Fitting, then, that today’s guest has written nearly 1,500 obituaries for the New York Times. Sam Roberts is a reporter on the Times’ obituaries desk and has a new book about the art of the obit entitled Are They Dead Yet? We recorded this a week before airtime, so I began by asking who’s going to die in the interim. He wasn’t sure — but noted that the Times keeps 2,000 advance obituaries ready. There are, he added, never enough. Beware, though, the Rockefeller curse. Roberts wrote David Rockefeller’s advance obituary, whereupon he learned that three other Times reporters had written Rockefeller advance obits — and all three were dead. (Rockefeller made it to 101.) Borrowing from Citizen Kane, Roberts hunts for the Rosebud moment, the epiphany that defines a life. He hunts for the soul of the subject, not the résumé. Hence his cheerful paradox that obituaries are about life, whereas death only figures in one sentence. As for famous last words, he’s a skeptic — most were composed later by better writers. The real ones, he suspects, are “help,” or “get me a drink.” And the obituarist’s own Rosebud moment? We have to go back to Brooklyn when he was a six-year-old boy. His father walked him to the corner to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession pass. “I want you to see history as it’s happening,” he explained. Half a century later, Roberts got David Greenglass to admit he had lied about the testimony that sent his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair. From the Times’ Portraits of Grief after 9/11, Roberts learned the book’s deepest lesson. There are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more — your mayor or your mailman? Or maybe your obit writer (or even your podcaster)? Sam promised that if he died before airtime, he’d call. The phone hasn’t rung. I’m still going too. On to episode 3,001. Five Takeaways •       2,000 Obits, Never Enough. The Times keeps some 2,000 advance obituaries on file, regularly updated — and people still surprise the desk (and presumably themselves) by dying unexpectedly. Print once had a deadline or two a day; now there’s a deadline every minute. The occupational hazards are real: three Times reporters wrote advance obits of David Rockefeller and predeceased him — Roberts, the fourth, survived to see his run when Rockefeller died at 101. And the genre changes its readers: “no man who has seen his own obit is ever the same again.” Alfred Nobel, mistakenly obituarized as dynamite’s merchant of death, endowed the Nobel Prizes in response — proof that a premature obituary can be the most consequential document a man ever reads.•       The Rosebud Method. Roberts’ organizing device comes from Citizen Kane: the Rosebud moment, the epiphany — a teacher, a meeting, an accident — that changed the trajectory of a life and made it worth recording. The model, via The Economist’s Ann Wroe, is the soul rather than the stenography: Wikipedia has the chronology; the obituary hunts the essence. Advance obits are never vetted by their subjects — facts checked, yes; the portrait, never — because an obituary is a news story, not a eulogy. And the form’s great secret is optimism: obituaries are about life. Death gets one sentence. (Famous last words, meanwhile, are mostly posthumous fiction. The real ones: “help,” or “get me a drink.”)•       Giuliani, Trump, Epstein. The hardest working file on Roberts’ desk: Rudy Giuliani — aggressive prosecutor, the mayor who proved New York governable, then a bitter Trump apologist indicted under the same statutes he once used on mobsters. How do you compress that into a lead paragraph? Andrew’s suggestion — a narrative of somebody who had a soul and then sold it — requires Shakespeare; Roberts insists on newspaper objectivity, omitting nothing and editorializing never. The Trump obituary already exists (its subject, Roberts guesses, would sue). And context keeps moving after death: Bush the defeated loser became Bush the elder statesman; Epstein’s reputation kept falling posthumously. Of the 150,000 people who die each day, three or four make the Times.•       The Rosenberg Rosebud. Roberts’ own epiphany arrived at age six, on a Brooklyn street corner where his father took him to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession: “I want you to see history as it’s happening.” His family otherwise met death with denial — six months after his father died, an aunt asked how Arthur was doing could only answer “so-so.” The Rosenberg thread ran through his whole career: decades later, for his book The Brother, David Greenglass admitted to Roberts that he had lied about the most incriminating testimony against his sister Ethel — evidence that, truthfully given, would likely have spared her the electric chair. When Roberts assigned graduate students to write his own advance obituary, none of them led with that. He would.•       No Ordinary Lives. From Portraits of Grief — the Times’ profiles of virtually every victim of the World Trade Center attack — Roberts drew the book’s central lesson: there are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? Carlyle asked whether history belongs to Hannibal or to the anonymous man who invented the spade. The desk has honored the principle in both directions: a front-page obituary for Hercule Poirot (the most famous Belgian, as Andrew noted), and a Jesus of Nazareth obituary written as the Times would have run it in AD 33 — ending, for lack of further confirmation, with the report that he was buried and his body disappeared. No beat generates more reader feedback. “As long as they’re reading it, I’m happy.” About the Guest Sam Roberts is a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, an obituaries reporter and former Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times, and the host of the Times’ “Close Up,” which he inaugurated in 1992. His many books include The Brother, Grand Central, A History of New York in 101 Objects, and Only in New York. A history adviser to Federal Hall, he lives in New York with his wife and two sons. Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit (Bloomsbury, August 11, 2026) draws on the nearly 1,500 obituaries he has written for the Times. References: •       Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury, August 11, 2026). Carl Hiaasen: “Mordantly wonderful.” Roz Chast: “I almost died laughing.”•       The Brother by Sam Roberts — in which David Greenglass admitted lying about the testimony that sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.•...

“By operating in secrecy, they’re able to avoid or evade accountability — and, in many instances, engage in anticompetitive behavior or even fraud.” — Renée M. Jones on unicorns Twelve years ago there were 39 unicorns — private companies worth a billion dollars or more. Today there are over 1,400, collectively valued above $7 trillion, with the twin beasts of Anthropic and OpenAI at the front of the herd, driving the entire American economy. A good thing, surely? Not according to Renée M. Jones, the SEC’s chief regulator of corporate finance from 2021 to 2023 and author of Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It. The former SEC big game warden worries that this stampede of wild unicorns might be driving the entire American economy off a cliff. Her problem isn’t that these private companies exist. It’s that we know almost nothing about them. That’s because of changes in the law since the Nineties that have lifted the hundred-investor cap on private funds, thereby enabling them to mushroom from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion. Add secondary markets where insiders quietly cash out, and the IPO becomes optional. And so we know almost nothing about companies like Anthropic and OpenAI with private valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The result is what Jones calls the founder-friendly model of Facebook, Uber or Airbnb. With super-voting shares at ten votes apiece, founders effectively choose their own bosses, thereby stripping investors of the power to discipline anyone. Think Travis Kalanick and Mark Zuckerberg. Think Theranos, WeWork and FTX. Unicorns are named, of course, for their impossibility. Not so long ago, nobody could imagine a private company worth more than a billion dollars. However, with $7 trillion now on the table, Jones is concerned about the health of the American startup economy. On the brink of the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, I fear Renée Jones might be right about the dangers of a real crash triggered by the stampede of these mythical creatures. Jurassic Park is now playing in Silicon Valley. Pass the popcorn. Five Takeaways •       The $7 Trillion Secret. The unicorn was named for its rarity: 39 existed twelve years ago. Today there are more than 1,400, worth over $7 trillion — roughly 1,100 in America, nearly 300 in China — and the biggest of them shape the economy while disclosing essentially nothing. That is Jones’ target: not the billion-dollar valuations but the secrecy. A billion-dollar private company faces neither the disclosure rules nor the governance requirements of a public company its size, which means accountability arrives only by accident — a scandal, a frustrated investor, a whistleblower calling a reporter. Everything else stays dark.•       How the IPO Died. Startups once went public within five to seven years, for two reasons: growth capital lived in public markets, and the 500-shareholder rule forced large private companies to register — it’s reportedly why Google and Facebook held their IPOs at all. Both reasons were legislated away. NSMIA (1996) uncapped private funds, whose assets exploded from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion; the JOBS Act (2012) moved the trigger to 2,000 shareholders with employee shares exempt; and secondary markets — Forge Global, Nasdaq Private Market, EquityZen — let insiders cash out without a prospectus. The IPO became a liquidity event rather than a necessity. Only AI’s bottomless capital hunger, Jones notes, is pushing OpenAI and Anthropic toward the public markets at all.•       Founders Choosing Their Bosses. The founder-friendly model gives startup founders super-voting shares — ten votes to one — letting them control the board that supposedly controls them. Venture capitalists lost their traditional power to discipline or dismiss a misbehaving founder: Uber’s investors, lacking the votes to oust Travis Kalanick, had to stage a coup via press leak. And the VCs are conflicted anyway — exposing fraud destroys the exit they’re invested in. Jones’ answer to the Google-and-Facebook counterargument is historical: dual-class structures were invented at those companies precisely to coax their founders into IPOs, and they now arrive by the second or third funding round — so the governance rot starts earlier and, as Zuckerberg demonstrates, persists indefinitely after the public offering.•       The Fraud Files — and the Social Bill. FTX. Theranos, which hid parts of its lab from inspecting regulators. WeWork, whose IPO filing finally told the truth about the spending and self-dealing — whereupon the public refused to buy, the company limped through a SPAC into bankruptcy, and employees who had borrowed money to exercise options and pay taxes were left holding worthless paper. (The VC money lost, Jones notes, is substantially public pension money anyway.) Beyond the frauds lies the social bill of the below-cost blitzscale: taxi drivers destroyed and then prices raised; passengers assaulted under lax background checks; Airbnb’s uncollected occupancy taxes, underinvested security, and name-based discrimination. A culture of outrunning the law, Jones argues, gets baked in — and firms powerful enough simply change the law, as Uber and Lyft did to driver-classification rules in California and Massachusetts.•       Not Teddy — Franklin. Asked whether the coming reckoning demands a new Teddy Roosevelt — Casey Michel’s prescription on this show days earlier — Jones reaches a generation later: Franklin’s New Deal securities acts of 1933 and 1934, which made disclosure the price of other people’s money and worked for ninety years. Since the 1980s the architecture has been chipped into optionality, and the SEC is now dismantling Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank protections while deregulating public markets too. Her remedies: disclosure to employees paid in options they cannot value, and disclosure in the largest private offerings — because investors of any sophistication cannot make responsible decisions while investing blind. Andrew’s closing verdict: I hope she’s wrong. I suspect she’s right. About the Guest Renée M. Jones is Professor of Law and Dr. Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School, where she has taught corporate and securities law for nearly a quarter century. From 2021 to 2023 she served as Director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — the nation’s chief regulator of capital formation. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, she is the author of Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It (Harvard University Press, August 4, 2026). References: •       Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It by Renée M. Jones (Harvard University Press, August 4, 2026). Jennifer Taub: “This essential book, replete with details and drama.”•       The National Securities Markets Improvement Act (1996) and the JOBS A...

“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed. Three days in August that changed the world. These historic 72 hours are the subject of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, by James M. Scott, America’s foremost chronicler of the Pacific War. This new book, Scott reveals, grew out of Black Snow, his history of the firebombing of Tokyo. But whereas Black Snow was a military study, he explains, Empire of Ashes focuses on Truman, Hirohito and the politics of nuclear warfare. By August 1945, Scott argues, Japan was already defeated. So surrender was a political decision — one that required a weak, figurehead emperor to summon the power to save his country from an even darker apocalypse. Should America regret these August days? Harry Truman certainly didn’t, Scott notes. In fact, in 1958 Truman even held a press conference in Independence, Missouri, to fire back at Hiroshima’s city council when it suggested that he should. Nor does Scott render much of a moral verdict of his own. “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think,” he explains, suggesting that we can all make up our minds by reading Empire of Ashes. So two bombs, somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 civilian deaths, and no crime? That, oddly enough, might be the biggest tragedy of those three days in August 1945 that changed the world forever. Five Takeaways •       Defeat Is Not Surrender. Scott’s organizing insight: as destructive as it was, the atomic bomb was inherently a political weapon, aimed at the chasm between a nation defeated and a nation willing to say so. Surrender is a political act — and Japan’s politics ran through Hirohito, ostensibly the center of political, cultural, and spiritual life, in practice a figurehead bypassed by militarists who had consolidated power through the 1920s and ’30s under the standing threat of assassination. His first peace soundings had to be conducted incognito, for fear of his own army; not until June 1945 does he rise to the occasion. Truman, by contrast, emerges as strong and morally serious — a First World War artillery officer who inherited the Okinawa bloodbath, approved the invasion of Japan, chose what he saw as the lesser evil, and then stopped all further atomic use the moment surrender came.•       The Firebombing Precedent. Would FDR have made the same call? “Absolutely. No doubt about it.” The moral threshold had already been crossed on March 9, 1945, when Curtis LeMay abandoned precision bombing and burned Tokyo — 105,000 men, women, and children in a single night, the most destructive conventional raid in history. The Pentagon braced for public outrage, monitoring editorials, radio, and the floors of Congress. None came; Time wrote that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.” LeMay took the green light and burned 64 cities — 170 square miles — before the first atomic bomb ever fell. War Secretary Henry Stimson confessed his amazement to his diary; FDR, with every opportunity to rein it in, said nothing. When Elliott Roosevelt later claimed his father would never have dropped the bomb, Stimson publicly corrected him.•       The Second Bomb Mattered More. Scott’s most counterintuitive argument: Nagasaki, not Hiroshima, ended the war. Atomic energy was the AI of its day — over a hundred academic papers in 1939 alone, new physics programs at Berkeley and Chicago, dreams of atom-powered ships — and Japan, which had its own failed program, knew exactly how ruinously expensive a bomb was to build. So after Hiroshima, the militarists reasoned the Americans could not possibly have another, and held to the plan of bleeding the invasion on the beaches for better terms. A second city destroyed seventy-five hours later shattered the illusion: if they can drop one every three days, they may have twenty — or two hundred. As for simply telling Tokyo? There were no channels beyond dropped leaflets and slow relays through neutral capitals. You could not, as Andrew noted, email in those days.•       In the Room Where It Happened. Scott’s method — borrowed, he says, from Hamilton — is to put readers in the room: the White House, the Imperial Palace, and above all the streets. He has interviewed survivors in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki across multiple books, and the physics of the firestorm connects all three: heat that melts concrete, fuses coins into lumps, welds roof tiles to kitchenware. Only five photographs were taken in Hiroshima on the day of the blast — stunned people, sitting. Organized rescue took thirty hours to arrive. In Nagasaki, the thirsty and burned waded into the river to die, so many that their bodies formed a dam. Radiation sickness began within thirty minutes. These are beautiful, functioning cities today, Scott notes — which is exactly why the accounts matter.•       No Regrets, No Verdict. Truman defended the decision to his grave — and then some: when Hiroshima’s city council passed a resolution in 1958 urging him toward remorse, he wrote back that Japan had started the war, then held a press conference at his museum in Independence to distribute the reply. The Oppenheimer film’s chilly Oval Office scene is overdramatized, Scott thinks, but true to the core: the buck — and the moral weight — stopped with the commander-in-chief, not the scientists. Scott himself, pointedly, renders no verdict: “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think.” Both sides laid out, 95 percent of the documents public, the reader left to grapple — which is perhaps why Black Snow sold well in Japan, and why Empire of Ashes will be published there next August 6. About the Guest James M. Scott is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, New York Times bestselling author, and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, widely regarded as America’s leading historian of the Pacific War. His books include Target Tokyo (Pulitzer finalist), Black Snow, Rampage, The War Below, and, with Jack Carr, Targeted: Beirut. A scholar-in-residence at The Citadel who leads battlefield tours across the Pacific, he lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War (W. W. Norton) is out now. References: •       Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton). The Charleston Post and Courier: “An amazing accomplishment.”•       Black Snow by James M. Scott — the firebombing of Tokyo, and the book whose cut Hiroshima chapters beca...

“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.” Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith. And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu’s ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.” What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today’s transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.” Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence. Five Takeaways •       Humans Create Intelligence. Keith’s editorial thesis distinguishes individual intelligence — where experts live, and always will — from the collective sum of everything all humans, living and dead, have ever contributed. That collective stock was once locked in encyclopedias, libraries, and universities; for the first time, AI can aggregate, distill, digest, and distribute it, at a price falling toward everyone. Knowledge, he writes, “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies” — but note the fine print: experts don’t disappear in this democratization. If anything, they get elevated: the expert reading an AI’s output about viruses understands it very differently than the rest of us.•       The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith’s much-shared essay argues that AI ends the era of the mathematical hero — and that’s fine, since most people (truck drivers, financial advisers, executive assistants) never got to be heroes anyway. Keith’s rebuttal turns on his central distinction: AI and intelligence are not the same word. There is no evidence, he argues, that AI creates new knowledge — it understands and distributes the existing stock. Innovation still takes individuals, and those individuals now start from a far higher floor, leveled up to everything already known. Heroes don’t go away; they multiply. In the world of AI, he suspects, every single teacher becomes one.•       “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” The week’s main event: Daron Acemoglu — via Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion interview and an Atlantic essay, with What Happened to Liberal Democracy out next week — wants AI agencies, grant programs, and public competitions to build “pro-worker AI.” Keith’s verdict: “complete bullshit.” The middle-class “fetishization of workers” is paternalistic; the wage is a temporary power relationship between employer and employee; and the end of the working class is precisely the progressive outcome — says the council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose aspiration was not to be working class. Pressed three times on what government should do amid the upheaval, Keith finally answered: “Allow it to happen… a good upheaval.” Though swap workers for people, he conceded, and he’d almost entirely agree — every teacher a hero, even in East Palo Alto.•       Bandwagons and Silences. Regular people are being arrested protesting data centers; Erin Brockovich — a Keen On guest some years back — is assembling class actions; Ezra Klein has begun folding anti-big-tech language into abundance. A politician-led bandwagon, Keith argues, regressive but keyed to genuine local concerns. The stranger fact is the silence on the other side: neither Altman nor Amodei nor Demis Hassabis is making the public case that AI benefits everybody — astonishing, Keith says, and the vacuum Acemoglu is trying to fill. Hassabis himself stepped aside at Google this week — a scientist returning to science as Sergey Brin becomes AI czar — while the Nobel-winning AlphaFold team has been quietly broken up. “Something strange is going on there.”•       A Drama in a Teacup. Is the AI economy real? Ed Zitron’s stat — 70 percent of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s AI revenue comes from OpenAI and Anthropic — is two-thirds right, says Keith, and no problem at all: beneath the concentration, the money comes from some two billion distributed users paying real subscriptions, and the revenues are sustainable. The Aschenbrenner postscript, via Porter Stansberry’s post of the week: he bet the chip layer (Samsung, SK Hynix) when the value sat a layer up, got the timing wrong more than the thesis, sold to Citadel at a discount — and kept his Anthropic shares, remaining a multi-billionaire. As for the coming reality check: Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO only when public capital beats private, and SpaceX’s wobble from $135 to $108 — through a 20 percent lockup release — counts as no catastrophe. Public markets, Keith reminds us, don’t determine the success of the underlying business. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “Humans Create Intelligence.”•       Noah Smith — “The End of the Age of Heroes,” on what happens to human ambition when the machines do the math.•       Daron Acemoglu — the Yascha Mounk interview at Persuasion, the Atlantic essay on pro-worker AI, and What Happened to Liberal Democracy, out next week.•       The Financial Times — “Google’s AI shakeup boosts Brin as DeepMind’s Hassabis steps aside.”•       Ed Zitron — on the 70 percent of hyperscaler AI revenue that flows from OpenAI and Anthropic.•       Porter Stansberry — post of the week, on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s losses, Citadel’s discount, and the drama in a ...

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall Yesterday, Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States, she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it. Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest’s child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob. So where’s the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it’s been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That’s who we are. Sometimes, at least. Five Takeaways •       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday’s Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.•       Democracy Didn’t Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest’s victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted officials, was many things; nonviolent protest it was not.•       No Pension Fund: Daisy Bates. Browne-Marshall’s favorite figure in the book: the Little Rock organizer who learned at nine that the woman raising her was not her mother — her mother had been murdered by a white mob and thrown in the pond where Daisy swam as a child. She guided the Little Rock Nine into Central High under armed National Guard escort amid daily death threats; as NAACP secretary she chose jail over surrendering the membership list, a refusal that went to the Supreme Court; she faced sexism inside the movement itself, spoke before the United Nations — and died nearly penniless, fed by neighbors. Protest has no vacation plan and no pension fund. (Mother Jones was smuggled into the same answer. “You’re cheating.” “I know. I am.”)•       Outsourced Outrage. Why the relative quiet now? COVID scattered Americans into silos; the administration’s shock-and-awe blitz kept them off balance; masked, nameless ICE agents and capitulating law firms (Paul Weiss, by name) spread fear; and — echoing Claire Stapleton’s moral-compass warning from earlier this week — “too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” mistaking an email or an Instagram post for action. What’s needed: leaders willing to fight, strategy and alliances, visible plans, and a protest that is for something — democracy, diversity, health, literacy. The model remains the March on Washington, whose anniversary falls August 28: one hundred organizers, a quarter-million regular people, and a government reminded of its own Constitution. About the Guest Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a civil rights attorney, and an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged and televised. Her books include She Took Justice, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society. She is the founder of Martyrs Day, observed July 5 in honor of slain protesters, and host of the forthcoming She Took Justice podcast. A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, ReVisioning History series), winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for history, is now out in paperback. She lives in New York City. References: •       A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (Beacon Press) — 500 years of resistance, from Powhatan’s stand against the English in 1607 to the climate protests of today.•       Curtis White’s On Resistance — Monday’s Keen On conversation on cultural resistance, to which this episode is the historian’s reply.•       Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil — whose warning against outsourcing your moral compass finds its twin in Browne-Marshall’s “outsourced outrage.”•       The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — her example of art doing what no pamphlet can: bringing the humanity of an issue to the fore.•       Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine — Central High School in Little Rock still stands as what Browne-Marshall calls a living monument to protest.•      &nbs...

“Jared Kushner is one of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — and he has no skill set to speak of that I can see.” — Casey Michel Four years ago, the muckraking journalist Casey Michel came on this show to discuss how the United States has built the greatest money-laundering scheme in history. That pre-Trump 2.0 America, he says, looks quaint. His new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy, describes an American casino where the Trump family has become the dealer with a perennially stacked deck. The word “oligarchy” comes with 2,500 years of baggage. Aristotle, not averse to aristocracy, nonetheless warned of the rule of the few. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy” as a way of describing the baronial rule of the late 19th century American capitalists. And, of course, it took a Roosevelt — the sickly scion of upper-crust New York — to dilute his own oligarchic caste with anti-trust law and inheritance & progressive income taxes. Exhibit A in this American oligarchy is Jared Kushner, who has leveraged his father-in-law’s rotten casino to ally with dictators and destroy democracy both in America and around the world. Michel says Kushner has “no skill set to speak of” — apart, of course, from an insatiable greed for wealth and power. The banality of the deal. So what to do? Michel is waiting for a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt — he names Talarico and Ossoff — who will tax and perhaps even prosecute Kushner and his fellow oligarchs. But I fear he is waiting for Godot. Teddy isn’t coming back. Nor is FDR. Don’t expect the banality of the current highly lucrative deal to end anytime soon. Five Takeaways •       Child’s Play. The anonymous shell companies and mystery donations of American Kleptocracy — dire enough in 2022 — now read as quaint. The scale has exploded (crypto, prediction markets, AI as accelerant), and so has the shamelessness: a Qatari luxury airliner gifted to a sitting president, and a $1.8 billion slush fund that will compensate January 6 rioters while granting Trump’s family, inner circle, and “associates” carte blanche from tax audits, past and future. America has had corrupt administrations — Grant, Harding, Nixon — but nothing, Michel argues, on this magnitude. Trump himself is symptom rather than cause: the culmination of trends decades in the making. “Shameless does not begin to describe it. I have to laugh — otherwise, I’m sure I’d just be crying.”•       From Aristotle to the Trillionaire. Aristotle popularized oligarchy: rule of the few — who must also be the wealthiest. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy,” and the Founders fought over “aristocracy”; Michel meets the 2020s where they are. The through line he found in the research: America’s anti-oligarchic champions come from inside the elite — above all TR, the sickly, bloodlet, electroshocked child of upper-crust New York who grew into the singular force against concentrated wealth: inheritance tax, progressive income tax, and a bully pulpit used without apology. Today’s benchmark: Gilded Age fortunes — Rockefeller’s $30 billion in modern terms — are pocket change beside centibillionaires and America’s first, briefly minted trillionaire.•       Exhibit A: Jared Kushner. One of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, the Gulf — with, in Michel’s judgment, no skill set to speak of: a string of failures from 666 Fifth Avenue to the New York Observer, redeemed by the single best thing he ever did, marrying Ivanka Trump. MBS bragged Kushner was “in his pocket”; James Comer told an intermediary to tell him to fuck off — making Kushner, Michel suggests, a genuinely bipartisan target for future investigations. Andrew pushed back — the network of autocrats is real, the Harvard degree is real — and the conversation settled on Arendt: not evil, but indifferent to good and evil. What Kushner cares about: Ivanka and her father, his bottom line, and carrying water for Benjamin Netanyahu.•       The Incentive Machine. Michel’s deeper argument indicts structures, not sinners: virtually none of this is illegal, which is precisely the problem. Corporate secrecy, campaign finance, and offshore taxation build an architecture in which allying with dictators is the rational move — if your competitor will meet MBS or Xi, you must too. Hence the corporate class’s standing ovation for Xi Jinping in San Francisco; Google’s Project Dragonfly censorship engine; Musk’s Tesla leverage in Beijing (and DOGE actions conspicuously in Chinese interest); the NBA’s progressive branding beside its Rwandan and Emirati partnerships; and Ireland, the thriving democracy at the bottom of the tax-haven barrel. Michel is happy to call the CCP one of history’s most monstrous regimes — and to note that no ideology, only rank financial interest, lays American CEOs at its feet.•       Waiting for Teddy. Does oligarchy actually weaken America? Michel points to the Iran war’s aftermath — collapsed interceptor stocks, an intact Tehran regime, Gulf monarchs getting their dirty business done at American expense — plus Greenland threats, wobbling alliances, and the nuclear proliferation he expects among abandoned allies. Andrew pressed the counter-case three times: Wall Street at record highs, half of America holding retirement accounts. Michel’s answer: inequality beyond anything in the national experience — and a political moment, left and right, hungry for anti-oligarchic leadership. The GOP just moved to kill the shell-company database; the remedy is a twenty-first-century TR — a Talarico, an Ossoff — willing to be denounced as a communist agitator. “If Teddy Roosevelt can be, I suppose anyone can.” About the Guest Casey Michel is an author, investigative journalist, and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of American Kleptocracy — named by The Economist one of the best books for understanding financial crime — and Foreign Agents, and his writing on offshoring, foreign lobbying, and illicit wealth appears in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on illicit financial networks and national security, holds a master’s from Columbia’s Harriman Institute, and is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work. United States of Oligarchy (St. Martin’s Press, August 4, 2026) is his third book. References: •       United States of Oligarchy by Casey Michel (St. Martin’s Press, Augu...

“We were still trying to change the world from the inside… and the empire struck back.” — Claire Stapleton on the Google Walkout Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed on how to fight back against big tech which included a reading list from previous guests on the show like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis and Astra Taylor. Not included was Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Partly, I assume, because this anti-Google jeremiad only came out yesterday. An idealistic English major straight out of college, Stapleton joined Google in 2007, when few questioned Silicon Valley’s utopian language. Her first job was in Google’s ministry of truth, an internal communications department designed, as she now admits, to get everybody high on the mission. And that mission was to train Googlers into becoming obedient corporate cogs by neither blaming the system nor questioning authority. While not exactly Winston Smith, she nonetheless rose in the bureaucracy. Rachel Whetstone (Steve Hilton’s wife) promoted Stapleton to the CEO’s communications team where, as the archivist of the sayings of the company’s two big brothers (Larry & Sergey), she became known as the “Bard” of Google. As an obedient corporate cog, she was both the message and the messenger. Until she wasn’t. Like Orwell’s Smith, Google’s Claire Stapleton eventually turned her ministry of truth language on the ministry itself. In response to the $90 million exit package of a senior Google exec accused of sexual misconduct, she co-organized the Google Walkout of 20,000 employees. Two months later, her role was hollowed out. Then she lost her job. Not quite Room 101. No rats. But not a lot of fun. So is Google evil? Stapleton doesn’t know. But the former Bard of Google acknowledges that Larry & Sergey’s promises of making the world a better place are no longer credible. Today, idealistic young college grads want to fight back against Silicon Valley. Today, nobody outside the internal communications department of Google, OpenAI or Anthropic believes that technology is making the world a better place. Like Claire Stapleton, we all now want to escape from big tech. Five Takeaways •       Getting High on the Mission. Google in 2007 wasn’t selling a job; it was selling a worldview — and Stapleton’s department, internal communications, existed to pump the mission, the values, and the founders’ folksy TGIF theater into a workforce growing by tens of thousands. The perks were the philosophy made visible: laundry, haircuts, dentists, masseurs — “letting Google be your housewife.” The indoctrination had a curriculum, too: Fred Kofman’s “radical accountability” training taught new hires to be players, not victims — which sounds empowering until you notice, as Stapleton did in a G-chat to her brother, that it means never blaming the system: “today I learned that if my team is dysfunctional, it’s my fault.”•       The Bard of Google. Rachel Whetstone — ex-London, politically shrewd, now married to California’s Republican gubernatorial nominee — drafted Stapleton onto Larry Page’s communications when Page retook the CEO job, making her the archivist of the founder’s vision (until, in a twist she still can’t quite believe, he literally lost his voice). From there: Creative Lab, “the alchemist lab of Google’s branding,” wrapped in change-the-world gobbledygook; then YouTube’s curation team, a job so dispensable that nobody on earth would notice if it stopped — David Graeber’s bullshit jobs made flesh, complete with colleagues vanishing to the gym for hours. Her bad bosses, she notes, were workaday and familiar — which is precisely the point. Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules explains why Google tried to constrain managers’ power: given too much, they abuse it, pettily.•       Normie, Not Whistleblower. Unlike Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People — a whistleblower’s damning portrait of Zuckerberg and Sandberg — Don’t Be Evil is a coming-of-age story from the rank and file: earnest, unjaded, “normie.” What’s genuinely new in it is the workers’-eye view of the tech-labor moment: a company that hired idealists on the promise of changing the world, then watched the worker-management relationship transform with whiplash speed once those idealists asked what corporate accountability actually looks like. “We were still trying to change the world from the inside, from a different direction, as we lumbered our way through labor organizing 101… and the empire struck back.”•       The Walkout and the Bill. The rupture came in 2018: the Me Too summer, an engineer’s memo against diversity itself, and the Times’ revelation of Andy Rubin’s $90 million exit after credible harassment findings. The moms listserv lit up; at TGIF, management read talking points “designed to absorb dissent, project empathy, and move right along” — radicalizing the woman who used to write them. The Walkout drew 20,000 employees. The bill arrived two months later: her role hollowed out, transfers blocked across the organizer group, Meredith Whittaker’s role dismantled, the rubber room. The group went public — the nuclear option — and Google offered severance. Stapleton, pregnant, asked for a year. An HR veteran’s verdict, years later: “They sure got you out cheap.” And the villains of her story, she notes, were mostly women — her own management chain — while Susan Wojcicki offered the older generation’s lament: you have no idea how hard it was for me.•       Don’t Outsource Your Moral Compass. Is Google better than the rest? There’s no noxious star — Sundar Pichai harmonizes rather than dominates — but the company owns the infrastructure of the digital world, and “is it more evil? less evil? I don’t know.” The deeper shift is industry-wide: Larry Page’s “treat workers well and they’ll contribute tenfold” has become “your job could easily go to AI, so be grateful.” Her advice to the young and idealistic: keep some skepticism; hold your own values in your own mind; let work be part of your life without letting it take over; build solidarity instead of “letting the overlords do their overlord thing.” The good news, she suspects, is that the spell is breaking anyway: audiences now boo the AI ads in movie theaters. About the Guest Claire Stapleton is a writer, communications consultant, and tech labor activist. She spent twelve years at Google in communications, marketing, and executive ghostwriting roles — becoming known as “the Bard of Google” — before co-organizing the 2018 Google Walkout, in which 20,000 employees protested the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment; The New York Times called it a watershed moment in tech. She writes an existential advice column for tech workers on Substack, and her account of her Google years, “The Voice of Google,” appeared in The New Yorker. Her first book is

“Uncertainty is what tells you that science is reliable. It’s the people who are absolutely certain that you have to watch out for.” — Stuart Firestein The physician-scientist Tony Fauci is having a rough week. His newly revealed diary has even disappointed traditional allies at The Atlantic and The New Yorker who see the hitherto liberal saint of the pandemic as both too intimate with power and too certain of his scientific assumptions. Fauci’s fellow American scientist, Stuart Firestein, is having a better week. The Columbia neurobiologist has a new book out today, It Could Be Otherwise, which is a manifesto against scientific certainty. It’s the certain ones you have to watch out for, Firestein warns about those scientists intoxicated with the certainty of their own doctrines. Science, Firestein argues, requires a blend of hubris and humility. So the great Isaac Newton needed real chutzpah to claim to understand the mind of the creator with only a few equations. The expert is, by definition, riddled by doubt. They should be the most uncertain person in the room. Thus for Firestein, Charles Darwin is a greater scientist than Albert Einstein because Darwin’s theory of life is premised on randomness. So will contemporary science appear quaintly medieval in 500 years? Will 26th century man think of Darwin and Einstein like we moderns patronize Aristotle? Probably, Firestein suggests. In his Columbia course on ignorance, he tells his students that getting an A requires getting an F. We should all be so ignorant. Five Takeaways •       Watch Out for the Certain Ones. Firestein won’t defend Fauci’s certainties, but he explains them: science requires a blend of hubris and humility — without some hubris, nobody would attempt a discipline that is mostly failure, mostly time spent in the dark. What corrupts the blend is a culture that demands the opposite of humility: exams with one right answer instead of ranked possibilities, journalists who need a confident quote, a public that has made science the theology of the twenty-first century. The result is Firestein’s paradox of expertise: the real expert is the most uncertain person in the room, because expertise means seeing the holes, the missing data, the failures. Certainty grows with distance from knowledge.•       True Enough. Truth gets a small t only. Borrowing from the Harvard philosopher Catherine Elgin, Firestein describes science as moving from one provisional truth to the next — “true enough,” always improving, never final. His favorite proof is John Maddox, Nature’s longest-serving editor, asked how many of the journal’s published papers would prove wrong: “Oh, that’s easy. All of them.” Not wrong-wrong — unsettled science is not unsound science; it is reliable and it will get better. In science, revision is a victory, which is why Firestein sincerely hopes that in five hundred years our best knowledge will look as quaint as medieval astronomy — which, he notes, was accurate enough for people who weren’t launching satellites.•       Two Kinds of Uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty is what we don’t know yet; ontological uncertainty is the irreducible complexity of the universe itself — so complicated it might as well be random. Every answer in the lab raises ten better questions, which is how the more we know, the less we know. And yet we thrive amid the not-knowing: lasers, GPS, and randomized drug trials are all built on uncertainty. Ninety percent of hypertension diagnoses are idiopathic — no known cause — while nine different families of medicine treat it successfully. Even the brain, his own subject, isn’t unknowable — we know plenty at every level — but the vertical knowledge, from ion channels to consciousness, may never reduce to a single formula. Multiple explanations, Firestein says, are not a defeat.•       Berlin, Darwin, and the Fox. The book’s presiding philosopher is Isaiah Berlin, the great value pluralist: many good answers to any real question, even incommensurable ones — which is emphatically not relativism (the poststructuralists get no comfort here; we still must choose, critically and responsibly). Berlin’s hedgehog and fox turn out to describe scientists too, and Firestein wants room for both. His scientific hero, though, is Darwin, whom he ranks above Einstein: the first person to show that tremendous organization and complexity can arise from essentially random events. Sixty-five million years ago, seven minutes of orbital difference and the asteroid misses. Randomness and uncertainty, properly understood, produce diversity and complexity — not chaos.•       When AI Learns to Be Uncertain. AI appears exactly once in the book, a restraint Firestein is proud of: “we hate the bomb, but we love anesthesia,” and it’s the use, not the thing, that will decide. Socrates was famously against writing — it did ruin our memories, and libraries were worth it; calculators did ruin long division, and who cares. In the classroom, the smell scientist admits you can no longer smell Claude in an essay — hence his ignorance course’s 999-word assignment, harder than the 5,000 words Columbia students write in their sleep. But his sharpest cut is at AI itself: the machines will be valuable to the extent that they are uncertain. When AI learns to weigh possibilities rather than issue single solutions, it will be intelligent — it will be human. A deterministic tick-tock universe is no place for discovery, imagination, or freedom. It could be otherwise. About the Guest Stuart Firestein is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, where his laboratory studies the sense of smell, and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. A Guggenheim fellow and elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is the author of Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, both translated into more than a dozen languages; he remains an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, where Failure was written. His new book is It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty (Basic Books, August 4, 2026). References: •       It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty by Stuart Firestein (Basic Books, August 4, 2026). Kirkus: “A solid and even stirring defense of science.”•       Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein — the 2012 book, born of his Columbia course, that made not-knowing respectable.•       The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin — the essay, and the value pluralism, that give the book its philosophical spine.•       True Enough by Catherine Elgin — the Harvard ph...

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White’s motto for resistance How to say no to fascism? Curtis White, the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance, the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the manifestos. But don’t expect a program. On Resistance is more of an anti-manifesto. “That’s not for me to say,” White responds when asked what, exactly, we’re supposed to do to resist fascism. His resistance is cultural. It’s an attitude. Borrowing from Ted Gioia’s subversive history of music, White likes the idea of “psychic treason.” Its patron saints are the first dropouts, romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who rejected the military, clergy and family to write poetry in the countryside. But On Resistance isn’t simply sixties nostalgia. White, a veteran of Berkeley and the Haight, prefers the Nietzschean imperative to forget the past and move on to the next joyful deed. So the only good manifesto is the anti-manifesto. If you want to say no to fascism, become a cranky utopian. Or at least pick up On Resistance. Five Takeaways •       Psychic Treason. White’s resistance is not conventionally political — Trump appears once or twice, party politics not at all. Borrowing “psychic treason” from Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History, he argues that the arts are subversive by nature: sometimes formally, sometimes by allying with social movements. His founding example is the Romantics, the first dropouts — Wordsworth and Coleridge refusing the military, the clergy, and the family estate to write poetry in the countryside, declaring cultural war once the church was out of the way. The treason White wants is the one the arts commit constantly, whether or not anyone calls it politics.•       Not Nostalgia — Nietzsche. The sixties made White: Berkeley in high school, San Francisco after, and the formative discovery that his country “had lied to me” and was indifferent to whether he lived or died. But On Resistance opens with the confession “I am living in a world that no longer exists” — and refuses to make anyone else live there. One chapter is bluntly titled “Forget The Beatles.” His position is Nietzschean: move on to the next joyful deed. And the rot, he insists, didn’t start with Trump but with Reagan — the decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods, education above all.•       The Three False Resistances. The book’s first half is ideology critique: our culture says resistance is unnecessary because it has already been provided — by philanthropy, virtuous corporations, and liberalism. White’s exhibits: Steve Jobs Buddha-branding the counterculture to sell machines to people who thought they were subverting something; the “big green” foundations (via Mark Dowie) taking over grassroots fights and defanging them; the Gates Foundation vaccinating children against polio downwind of a polluter it was invested in. Philanthropy, he argues, self-limits to protect the source of its own wealth. Patagonia may be the quiet exception that proves the rule.•       Dropping Out, Together. White’s alternative is dropping out — plural: doing something else, and doing it with other people. The organic farms and farmers markets that have created communal well-being in most American cities; FC2, the author-run press he co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, past its fiftieth anniversary; the thriving-but-invisible independent presses — Graywolf, Coffee House, Rochester’s Open Letter — for which he’s now plotting a group Substack. The obstacle is the money jail: everyone’s struggle for money limits what it is possible to do. The goal isn’t overturning the status quo. “What we need right now is companions.”•       Misbehave, Make Something Beautiful, Try to Win. White’s motto since The Middle Mind — the making beautiful needn’t be art; the trying to win is where misbehavior gets socialized. His lineage runs Thoreau, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and above all John Berger: Marxist, art critic, poet, writer of lively living books. His Marxism, such as it is, is the humanist 1844 Manuscripts — alienation, not expropriation — via Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. And the book itself is the argument: playful and fierce, a performance that moves like a novel, reinvigorating worthy old ideas rather than hunting new ones. At 75, it’s his last nonfiction — written in a spirit of play, to be left in one. About the Guest Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose books include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed. Called by Elle “the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment,” he is co-founder, with Ronald Sukenick, of FC2, the publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors, and taught English for many years at Illinois State University. His new and, he says, final work of nonfiction is On Resistance: A Manifesto (Melville House, August 11, 2026). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington. References: •       On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (Melville House, August 11, 2026). Jeffrey St. Clair: “a trail guide through our disorienting and perilous political landscape.”•       Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia — the source of “psychic treason” and the argument that the arts subvert by nature.•       The Middle Mind by Curtis White — where the motto was coined: misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.•       Jon Taplin in Rolling Stone — the recent essay asking whether the counterculture can rise again, and a recent Keen On conversation in the same key.•       One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse — the Western Marxist tradition, via the 1844 Manuscripts, that taught White to worry about alienation rather than expropriation.•       FC2 — the author-run press of innovative fiction White co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, now past its fiftieth year. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTube<...

“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It’s the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our age of Claude and Gemini, almost requires the use of AI. A couple of weeks ago Keith confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he is writing an AI-assisted book entitled Who Owns Intelligence. This week, publishing discovered what happens when others play the same game without public acknowledgement. So we have the case of the “red-hot” debut novel, fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped overnight when the agent found AI in the mix. “It’s a fantastic book,” the book’s agent acknowledged, before firing its less than transparent author. Which, for Keith, is precisely the scandal. His position, argued in this week’s editorial “AI Detected,” is pretty absolute. Nothing is written by AI, Keith argues, because AI has no will. It doesn’t produce a single word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent, he says, even when 100 percent of the manuscript is spat out by the machine. So the real sin isn’t using AI but not acknowledging its use. So, on Who Owns Intelligence, Keith makes it crystal clear that “AI was heavily used in the writing of this book.” I’m not so sure. Amazon is now infested with AI slop that requires no authorship. Besides, Keith clearly has no love of reading books. He admits to reading only a single volume in the last couple of years. And he’s still smarting from being, in his mind at least, ripped off by the publishing industry for his last published book some 40 years ago. He no longer needs to read books, he pronounces, because his world-view is already set. For a man who thinks he knows everything, AI isn’t scary. Maybe we should rename him Claude. Postscript. Full Keith-style disclosure: these shownotes were produced with the help of Anthropic. When I fed Claude my draft, it responded: “‘Maybe we should rename him Claude’ is a closer I’m contractually obliged to enjoy.” Nothing, as Keith says, is written by AI. Although some algorithms seem to have cheeky opinions of their own. Maybe Anthropic should rename it Keith. Five Takeaways •       Nothing Is Written by AI. Keith’s absolutism starts from the machine’s lack of will: AI won’t produce a word unless a human asks. His Who Owns Intelligence — fifteen chapters, arguments, and references — was structured in ninety minutes from years of thinking; the AI produced a manuscript he then shaped, like a color grader working sliders in Photoshop. The human part is 99 percent even when the machine types every word. And authorship was never solitary anyway: Plato’s contemporaries thought writing itself degraded ideas, and no publisher will touch a book that hasn’t passed through an editor and a subeditor. If editing doesn’t change authorship, Keith asks, why would AI?•       Transparency, Not Technology. The week’s cautionary tale: a debut novel fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped when the agent discovered AI — while conceding, in the same breath, “it’s a fantastic book.” For Keith the scandal is concealment, not composition: own the tool, as he now does with a strapline under his byline. The detection regime, meanwhile, is collapsing on its own inaccuracy — universities dropped their AI detectors this week, and Substack’s new detection partner scored Keith’s human-shaped editorial as 100 percent AI when a fair reading was 40. Cheating exists only against obsolete rules: the question is moving from did you use AI to how well did you use it.•       “The Publishing Industry Is Basically a Scam.” Keith’s response to Andy Hunter’s ban on AI-generated books — from last week’s Keen On interview — was one word: outrageous. There is no such thing as an AI-written book, only good and bad ones; and the true victim of publishing is not the bookstore but the author. Exhibit A: his own 1988 book sold 50,000 copies at £3.99 and earned him roughly £10,000 — about 5p a copy — while Penguin took the rest. The future he wants is direct, author-to-reader, without the middlemen. As for “organic” artisanal literature: real, elite, and tiny — the new vinyl, which is itself cut these days from digital masters.•       Sharks, Playing Their Own Book. Leopold Aschenbrenner — fired young from OpenAI, transfigured by one prophetic essay into the “Nostradamus of AI” — saw his $45 billion, heavily leveraged Situational Awareness fund lose $600 million, get margin-called, and sell to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. (He is, Keith suspects, still super rich.) Zuckerberg’s sudden conversion to open source as “the distribution of wealth to the people” struck us both as a bit rich; Amodei’s “I’m not against open source as long as it’s safe” — from a man on record that no AI is safe — translates as: against. Keith’s deeper complaint, from an admiring Claude user: you can’t trust Dario. And China, hardware-constrained, has made open source its national strategy — undermining American foundation-model revenue one cheap routed prompt at a time.•       Money Won’t Matter by 2036? Elon Musk predicts money becomes irrelevant within a decade; Vinod Khosla — our post of the week — thinks he might just have a point. Keith, ever the economics tutor, reaches for tendency and ceteris paribus: money is a means of exchange and a store of value, and if abundance drives the labor-value of things toward zero, its irrelevance is not illogical — though between tendency and reality lies a whole ton of variables. I bet the opposite: that by 2036 money will matter more than ever. The problem, we discovered, is the stake — you can’t bet money on money not mattering. Wives and children were proposed and hastily withdrawn (“We’d be losing, Andrew”). Loser buys dinner — at a free restaurant. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “AI Detected.”•       The Wall Street Journal — on the red-hot debut novel at the center of publishing’s AI mystery: fourteen publishers, one discovery, one dropped author.•      ...

“Not everybody needs therapy. I’m a therapist and I’ll tell you first.” — Amy Morin Is an epidemic of mental weakness sweeping America? Readers of the Wall Street Journal certainly might think so, given a couple of recent articles. In one, it reports on burnt-out singles who are using spreadsheets to evaluate their dates. In the other, young adults are taking their phones to social events and letting AI do their talking. Sad. So I invited Ms Mental Strength herself, Amy Morin — host of the Mentally Stronger podcast and author of The Mental Strength Playbook — to ask what’s happened to American self-confidence in our AI age. Morin sees it daily in her own therapy office with patients relying on ChatGPT to set boundaries with their mothers-in-law. In a world of information overload, she argues, we’ve come to believe there must be a medical solution to all our complexities — forgetting that relationships are an art, not a science, and that conflict and awkward silences are features of human life rather than bugs. So the dinner-party guests who sneak off with their pocket supercomputers to the bathroom to ask ChatGPT for five “interesting” questions come back with canned questions that make them sound even less interesting. In contrast, Morin argues, real social confidence is built by taking risks. And it’s no longer a risk, she suggests, to go to a therapist. It’s become the equivalent of slinking into the bathroom with your phone to prompt conversation. Yes, this therapist worries we live in an overly therapeutic culture. Anxiety is normal, Morin says. But ADHD diagnoses and even autism have become a kind of moral passport in America. It’s almost as if people should be anxious if they’re not anxious. Her prescription is free. Not even the cost of a therapy session. Ask yourself, at the end of every day, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? It’s like going to the gym. Build up your mental strength. Become self-reliant. The standard American fix. That will kick your therapy habit. That will end the epidemic of mental weakness now engulfing the United States. Five Takeaways •       AI Is Doing Our Talking. The Wall Street Journal reports singles running spreadsheets on their dates and young adults letting AI script their conversations in person — and Morin sees the same thing in her therapy office, where clients ask ChatGPT how to set boundaries with their in-laws. The root, she argues, is information overload: because we can look up how to fix a sink, we assume there’s a scientific way to reject a suitor or confront a friend. But relationships are an art, not a science. There is supposed to be tension; conflict isn’t horrible; real human conversations — with questions, uncertainty, and lulls — are essential. What could be more important than managing your own relationships yourself?•       Avoidance Never Builds Confidence. The dinner-party guest who hides in the bathroom asking ChatGPT for five interesting questions comes out asking canned questions and listening to no one — panicking about what was next on the list. Relying on technology for what makes us insecure, Morin argues, is avoidance dressed as help: skills we don’t practice diminish, so the app makes us worse, not better. Nor is the polished online persona sustainable — like fake photos on a dating profile, the eloquence collapses at the second coffee. Connection comes from vulnerability, not perfection: “I really struggle with X” bonds people; the perfect question does not.•       Thirteen Things, Fifty Million Readers. Morin’s authority is autobiographical. Her mother died when she was 23; on the third anniversary of that death, her 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack; later her father-in-law received a terminal cancer diagnosis. On one of the worst days of her life she wrote herself a letter — 13 things mentally strong people don’t do — and read it over and over. Published online for what she assumed would be five readers, it reached fifty million and became seven books in more than 45 languages. Mental strength, she learned, isn’t resilience-as-bracing: it’s getting the most out of life on the emotional roller coaster — good times included.•       Not Everybody Needs Therapy. Asked whether we live in an overly therapeutic culture, this therapist says yes. Anxiety is a normal emotion — without it you wouldn’t look both ways — but pandemic-era applause for disclosure watered down the difference between sadness and clinical depression, awkwardness and social anxiety disorder. TikTok quizzes hand out ADHD; “burnout” now means tired; autism risks becoming a passport; and self-diagnosis becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile 96 percent of college students say they arrived academically prepared — and most say they arrived emotionally unprepared. As editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, Morin went undercover on the online-therapy platforms: some therapists were excellent; others gave canned advice that frightened her. And the worried well, she warns, clog the six-month waiting lists the seriously ill cannot afford.•       Your Body Believes What Your Brain Tells It. The Guardian’s Emma Beddington recently asked whether Morin’s “power phrases” could turn a self-described spineless worm into a go-getter. Answer: yes — walk into a room thinking nobody likes me and your body language obliges; walk in resolved to do your best and it obliges again. Nobody changes their life by sitting on the couch thinking positive — action is required — but thought is the first step. Her daily practice: ask, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? And the anger all around us? How we treat others reflects how we feel about ourselves — the troll’s cruelty is a quick boost for a self he can’t stand. Technology, finally, cuts both ways: never has expert advice been this free. Feed your mind well or feed it junk. Up to you. About the Guest Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and internationally bestselling author whose books — including 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do — have sold more than a million copies in over 45 languages. She has practiced therapy for more than twenty years, served as editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, and hosts the award-winning Mentally Stronger podcast; her TEDx talk, “The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong,” is among the most viewed of all time with more than 25 million views. Her new book is The Mental Strength Playbook: 50 Tools to Cope with Stress, Thrive Under Pressure, and Gain a Competitive Edge in the Workplace (Rodale, April 2026). She lives on a sailboat in the Florida Keys. References: •       The Mental Strength Playbook by Amy Morin (Rodale, April 2026). Lori Gottlieb: “Amy Morin shows you how to feel better and do better — starting right...

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today’s $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today’s digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. These network effects, you see, can be subverted. They might even be used as weapons against a seemingly dominant player like Amazon. Take, for example, Bookshop.org. Founded by Andy Hunter in 2020, this online bookstore has aggregated 3,000 independent bookstores, these affiliates contributing to a counter-Amazon network that already does 2% of Amazon’s book business and will, within the next thirty days, pass $50 million distributed to local bookstores. When Hunter originally pitched the idea to Silicon Valley investors, they asked him if he could beat Amazon on price or speed. No. Then you don’t have a chance, they told him, because Americans only care about price and speed. But they were wrong. Since Bookshop.org launched in 2020, American bookstores have grown from 1,900 to 3,300, with 90% of these independents joining Bookshop.org and 98% of booksellers polling the company as a positive force. His is a winner-share-all marketplace where stores keep the full profit of their own sales, while a $4.5 million annual profit pool flows to any real brick-and-mortar ABA bookstore. Nobody gets rich, Hunter says, but everybody does okay. Hunter suspects that if Bookshop.org grows to take 5% of Amazon’s book market, things might turn nasty. Could Amazon just buy Bookshop.org, I asked. No, Hunter responded, all his investors signed a clause barring a sale to any major US retailer. So even if I got hit by an Amazon delivery truck, he explained, his mission couldn’t be undone. So is Amazon evil? Not exactly evil, he explains, since evil requires malignant intent. But Amazon is more like fishermen who overfish until the stock collapses and wrecks their ecosystem beyond repair. That classic tragedy of the commons. Hence Bookshop.org’s anti-Prime campaigns, which used Amazon’s “discount” holiday as a way of generating an extra $1.2 million for its affiliate bookstores. Hunter wants to replace Amazon’s seemingly infinite scalability with a more moral kind of scale. He imagines a Bookshop.org for everything from hardware stores and art supplies to bikes and toys. Silicon Valley’s conventional winner-take-all economics would be replaced by a Robin Hood style winner-share-all model. Except for our tech bro friends, I suspect we would all be wealthier for it. Five Takeaways •       “Americans Only Care About Price and Speed.” That was the verdict of a 2019 conference call with twenty Silicon Valley angel investors: if Bookshop couldn’t beat Amazon on price or speed, it had no chance. Hunter’s counter-pitch: enough people care about their values when they shop — if supporting a local bookstore is made just as easy. His sharpest insight was the affiliate economy: by 2019 the internet had become one giant funnel pushing every reader toward Amazon, with the New York Times, NPR, BuzzFeed, and celebrity book clubs all earning Amazon kickbacks on their book coverage. Bookshop’s universal link gave them an alternative that pays local bookstores instead. Nine months of rejection later, he had cobbled together $750,000 — with the publisher Morgan Entrekin introducing five of the original seven investors.•       Winner-Share-All. Bookshop is a marketplace, like Etsy: over 3,000 bookstores plus affiliates from Literary Hub to The Atlantic to Dakota Johnson’s book club. Stores keep the full profit on their own sales; direct sales feed a profit pool — 33 percent of profits, about $4.5 million a year — shared with any real brick-and-mortar bookstore in the American Booksellers Association. Within thirty days, total distributions will pass $50 million. Hunter kept the raise tiny and refused venture capital to protect the mission: a $10 million check would have demanded a 10x return and a sale, and Bookshop’s shareholder agreement bars any sale to Amazon, Walmart, or Target. The company runs on a 12.5 percent expense ratio and twelve engineers. Nobody gets rich; everybody does okay.•       The Comeback Numbers. Amazon put over half of America’s bookstores out of business in two decades. Since Bookshop launched in 2020, the country has gone from 1,900 bookstores to 3,300 — seventy percent growth — and 73 percent of member stores grew in 2025. The rising tide lifts all boats: Bookshop grew 55 percent last year while stores’ own websites grew 25 percent. Ninety percent of American independents have joined, and a poll of 3,000 booksellers found 98 percent view the company positively. Meanwhile Amazon’s share of the book market is flat for the first time in twenty-three years. Bookshop has taken about 2 percent of Amazon’s book customers — small enough to be useful anti-monopoly evidence, Hunter jokes, but a social movement in the making.•       Not Evil — Worse? Hunter refuses the word “evil”: evil requires malignant intent, and Amazon’s managers are merely told to grow profits every quarter. The better analogy is overfishing — blind growth that destroys the ecosystem beyond repair. But the stakes are not merely commercial: bookstores bring authors to communities, raise new generations of readers, and — as the arrest of five Hong Kong booksellers reminds us — stand as the vanguard of free expression. No single company, good or evil, should control a market so essential to human consciousness. As for Bezos, once so interested in climate change: now it’s rockets and data centers. “Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.”•       The AI Flood. Did OpenAI and Anthropic steal from authors? “They were,” Hunter says — a conscious choice that stealing was faster than dealing, and now they’re paying up because they got caught, in a race to be first that cuts regulatory, legal, and ethical corners. Meanwhile three times as many books are being added to Amazon each year than before AI — overwhelmingly scam books generated from search trends, uncopyedited, designed to defraud buyers rather than inform them. Bookshop tells its suppliers to keep AI books off the site entirely, with a tiny asterisk for serious poets making artistic investigations of AI. Hunter’s standard is simple: these aren’t books, they’re scams — and no retailer who cares about customers should sell them. Including Amazon. About the Guest Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports local independent bookstores, launched in January 2020 and named by Time one of the year’s most influential social-good companies. A longtime literary publisher and entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Electric Literature and Literary Hub. He lives in Brooklyn. References: •       Bookshop.org — the marketplace itself: shop any of 3,000+ independent bookstores, or let your purchase feed the profit pool.•  &nbsp...

Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month’s Harper’s cover story, “Radical Reformation,” it’s because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times. The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power. That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel’s “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More’s attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What’s new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar. Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization’s moral crown jewel. John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church’s role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation. No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who’s going to be out of office in a couple of years isn’t in his interest. It’s too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God’s representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two. Five Takeaways •       The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.•       The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More’s attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn’t flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn’t need one otherwise. What’s new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.•       9/11 Drove the Wedge. For most of the twentieth century the secular West treated the church as a civilizational feather in its cap. The war on terror changed that: the enemy was recast not as a rival religion but as religion as such — the new atheism was its rhetorical arm — and John Paul II’s vociferous opposition to the Iraq War marked the rupture. Beneath it all, the secularization thesis (societies modernize, therefore secularize) had collapsed, its death usually dated to Iran in 1979. Reason and faith, Hanson argues, are far more intertwined than the twentieth century assumed — and, not coincidentally, the church and the left hit their historical nadirs together and are now showing signs of life together.•       Magnifica Humanitas: Arguing with the Machines. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI and humanity is remarkable, Hanson suggests, less for its conclusions than for its method: reasoned, humane argument addressed to people of all goodwill, in an age of universal bombast — from a leader with no personal stake in the outcome. It includes an apology for the church’s involvement in slavery, an acknowledgment that the church itself once practiced the exclusionary humanism it now warns against. While subway billboards advise companies to “stop hiring human beings,” the church’s real power, Hanson argues, is the legitimation of popular dissent: since Vatican II redefined the church as the People of God, the pope’s voice works by inspiring people to find their own.•       Too Small a Task. Was the American pope elected to counter the American president? “His name wasn’t mentioned once,” a conclave cardinal insisted — a denial Andrew files next to Casablanca’s “shocked, shocked.” Either way, Leo refuses a direct debate with Trump, and Hanson insists this is the harder path, not the easier one: the pope aims to beat Trump on a higher register, shaping consciences in America and across the globe rather than winning a news cycle against a president who’ll be gone in a couple of years. As for the evangelical prosperity gospel wing of MAGA: essentially in schism, Hanson says — not much to do with historical Christianity, politically or theologically. About the Guest Jack Hanson received his PhD in religious studies from Yale in 2024 and has taught there. His essays and criticism on religion, politics, and literature have appeared in Harper’s and elsewhere. His cover essay, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” appears in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly in America. He lives in upstate New York. References: •       “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival” by Jack Hanson — the cover essay of the current Harper’s Magazine.•       On Statesmanship by Steven B. Smith — yesterday’s Keen On conversation on the crisis of secular authority, which opens this one.•       Rerum Novarum (1891) — Leo XIII’s encyclical on capital and labor, the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching.•       Magnifica Humanitas — Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI, technology, and the human person, including its apology for the church’s involvement in slavery.•       Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker — the American wing of the radical tradition Hanson traces.•&nb...