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Keen On America

Andrew Keen

Nobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR.

Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show, please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America – keenon.substack.com

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  • #3082
    Yesterday · 49 min

    Kill B-School? Chris Marquis’s Case for Abolishing the MBA

    “They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis INTRO You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says. His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its own indestructible logic. Faculty won’t change what they teach, and even if they did, the recruiting office is paid to slot people into the highest-salaried job it can find, because that is what the rankings reward. And so, Marquis argues, we have created an economic culture of B-School-trained chief executives focusing on dividends and so cutting labor benefits and community investment. Rather than being created, value is moved from the workforce and community into the share price. It’s an MBA world and we are all poorer for it. His fix is constitutional rather than curricular. He would replace the business school with what he calls a school for organizing. But what to organize? He’d like to see a new kind of economy mirroring companies like Patagonia (owned by a trust) or Mondragon (owned by its eighty thousand workers). A quarter of Denmark’s biggest firms are owned by foundations, he reminds us, and in Europe a public-interest director with a veto is unremarkable. So maybe we should just replace the MBA with a trip to Denmark. A bloodless way to kill the B-School. FURTHER READING • “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down,” New York Times, 18 October 2026. The headline is the paper’s; Marquis wrote “abolish.” • Marquis tells Poets&Quants what he would build instead — and the trade press rounds up the reaction, which is less hostile than you would guess. • His books: The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. • Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great — the governance argument Marquis leans on here. ABOUT THE GUEST Chris Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, on sabbatical this term and moving to a chaired professorship in international business at Cornell in January. He spent a decade at Harvard Business School and a year and a half at the Kennedy School. He is the author of The Profiteers and Mao and Markets. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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  • #3081
    Thursday · 42 min

    A Dangerous Beauty: Mark Allen & Tricia Aurand on JFK, the Mob and Judith Exner

    “President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison. Mark Allen, a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election. All this is in A Dangerous Beauty, a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand. Frank Sinatra introduced Exner to both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana — JFK at the Sands in February 1960, Giancana at the Fontainebleau a few weeks later. Nobody disputes Exner’s familiarity with either man. It’s the envelopes that historians have spent fifty years trying to decipher. Especially given all the conspiracy theories about the interconnectedness of the Kennedys, the mob, the CIA, Castro and Dallas. The twist in A Dangerous Beauty is not what we expect from a book about JFK’s tangled relations with a beautiful young woman. If Exner was telling the truth, Allen and Aurand argue, then the Kennedys knew exactly what the CIA was doing to Castro, because they themselves were running the operation. Which destroys the premise underneath every rogue-agency theory of Dallas. So Allen and Aurand are anti-conspiracy theorists. The CIA, they suggest, probably wasn’t behind the 1963 assassination. Allen is agnostic on who shot the president. What he wants to demolish is the idea that JFK was betrayed and even murdered by his own government. A conspiracy theory that, he warns, is being peddled today by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. FURTHER READING • A Dangerous Beauty: The Kennedys, the Mob, the FBI, and Judith Exner, the Woman Who Linked Them All (Post Hill Press), with a foreword by Patt Morrison. • The Church Committee investigated CIA assassination plots in 1975. Exner testified that September, three months after Giancana was shot dead in his basement. • Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), gave Exner’s courier account a chapter and broad acceptance. It changed few minds. • Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is the recent bestseller on the wider pattern. • Mark Allen, “RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories do a disservice to his father,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 7 July 2023 — his dismantling of the three stories RFK Jr. tells about his father and the CIA. ABOUT THE GUESTS Mark Allen is a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney and a longtime student of the Kennedy presidency. He came to the subject through the JFK assassination and interviewed Judith Exner in the last years of her life, after Anthony Summers made the introduction. He lives in Sarasota, Florida. Tricia Aurand is a writer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. A Dangerous Beauty is published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Patt Morrison. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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  • #3080
    Wednesday · 39 min

    Will the Midterms Be Fair? Michael G. Miller on How the Supreme Court Broke the Voting Rights Act

    “We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices. That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller, a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris, Miller has written An American Problem, a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics. The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder, five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy. FURTHER READING • An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris. • Shelby County v. Holder (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent. • Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title. • Kevin T. Morris is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives. ABOUT THE GUEST Michael G. Miller is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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  • #3079
    Tuesday · 34 min

    On the Social Reckoning: Noam Cohen Watches Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook Sequel

    “Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck. Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama. Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire. My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not. FURTHER READING • The Social Reckoning (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting. • “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here. • Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017). • Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”. ABOUT THE GUEST Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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  • #3078
    Monday · 45 min

    A History of Cities in 32 Inventions: Jonn Elledge on the Ideas & Technologies That Built Our World

    “It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge “Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting. Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves. Et voilà (rather than eureka!). Thus came mathematics, literacy, politics, accountancy and eventually literature. So what we think of as civilization owes itself to urbane places like Bethnal Green. Without such hotspots, you wouldn’t be able to read this. No wonder some of our most glittering cultural figures — Mick Jagger, John Grisham, Robert Plant — studied accountancy. You can’t always count what you want. Not even a history of cities in 32 1/2 inventions. FURTHER READING • Jonn Elledge, A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions (The Experiment, 13 October 2026). The UK edition is 31 Inventions That Built Our World. • The extra American chapter is on the Los Angeles streetcar conspiracy. The other cut chapters are free on his Substack. • Elledge created and ran CityMetric at the New Statesman, and also wrote A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and Conspiracy, with Tom Phillips. • The theory he couldn’t name at 17:20 is urban scaling — Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt’s finding that productivity rises faster than population, building on Alfred Marshall on agglomeration. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. Why Ideas Cluster There is no technical reason a bank or a tech firm needs to sit next to its rivals — and yet they always do. Elledge puts it down to the sheer density of interactions: more people having more conversations, so more chances for ideas to collide. It is also why Britain worries that Manchester and Birmingham underperform Lyon and Munich. 2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed In 1800 armies crossed Europe no faster than they had two thousand years earlier. You could cover twenty miles a day, so politics happened at twenty miles a day. Nation states are not really possible until the railways of the 1830s. It is the Roman Empire, Elledge notes, not the Italian one. 3. Gilgamesh Already Knew The oldest surviving work of literature, from Uruk four thousand years ago, already splits the world between the walled city — comfortable, advanced, faintly decadent — and the wild country beyond, which is more dangerous and more authentic. Brexit and the Rust Belt are running on the same fault line. 4. The Empty State Building Two architects raced to build the tallest tower, each secretly adding height beyond the published plans. Both topped out in the autumn of 1929, exactly as America discovered it had too much office space. The Empire State Building stood half empty for years and acquired the nickname. 5. The Tube Has Warmed the Ground Edwardian posters invited Londoners to cool off on the Bakerloo line on hot days. A century of trains in unventilated tunnels has since raised the temperature of the earth around them, and nobody is sure how to undo it. ABOUT THE GUEST Jonn Elledge is a British journalist and author. He created and ran CityMetric, the New Statesman’s urbanism site, and was an assistant editor there; he has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the i. His books include A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything and, with Tom Phillips, Conspiracy. He writes The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything and lives in London. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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  • #3077
    Sunday · 55 min

    The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Paul Loeb on Perseverance & Hope in Troubled Times

    “If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb The Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb, the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going. In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny’s prison journals, essays from Jesmyn Ward & Rutger Bregman and a chapter on the South Korean coup. What’s changed over the last couple of decades, Loeb says, is the routinization of surveillance, the attacks on democratic institutions, and the daily reality of climate disaster. Hope, Loeb reminds us, isn’t blind optimism. His most hopeful stories in the new anthology are about people who weren’t heroes. In Seoul in December 2024, as troops moved to shut the parliament, one detachment stopped for ramen noodles. They had their orders, Loeb says, but food came before politics. In Norway in 1942, eleven thousand teachers simply declined to teach fascism. So history often isn’t made by Havel, MLK or Mandela-style heroes. Hope, then, lies in the action and sometimes inaction of ordinary people. In Seoul noodle restaurants or Norwegian classrooms or on the streets of Minneapolis. FURTHER READING • Paul Rogat Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While (Basic Books, 13 October 2026). Full contents and excerpts. • Loeb also wrote Soul of a Citizen and Generation at the Crossroads, and founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project. More. • The Korean chapter is Jungmin Choi’s “Lightsticks and K-Pop”. The Norwegian teachers are Loeb’s own essay, “Refusing to be Quislings”. • The Berlin story AK asks for is the Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends Asked whether the arc of history bends toward justice, Loeb says no. It can bend, depending on how we act. What he has instead is Havel’s distinction, written in 1986 when the Czech dictatorship looked permanent: optimism expects things to turn out, hope is what lets you act when they might not. 2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan Solar output doubled in two years, then again in one. Pakistani farmers skip the permits and the installers and simply lay panels on the ground — a third of the grid displaced in a year, and panels now turning up in wedding dowries. But prices collapsed because the German Greens pushed through subsidies. Citizen action made the technology cheap. 3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse Pressed on whether readers might cast themselves as martyrs when Mandelstam’s Russia and the present are nothing alike, Loeb concedes it at once. Then the counter-example: the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men gathered outside a Berlin collection point until the men were released. He won’t claim it could have beaten the Nazis. Only that it happened. 4. King’s Letter Was About the Elites Rereading Letter from Birmingham Jail, Loeb says it clicked. King’s target — the white man of goodwill whose silence does more damage than the Klansman — maps onto the elite law firms and university presidents. Ordinary people, he says, have come out of this year better than the elites. 5. Act Before the Space Closes In Buenos Aires he met a young Russian couple. She protested when Navalny came home; then the protests shrank, the cost rose, and now none of them do. The lesson is leverage: a closing democracy gives you infinitely more of it than one that has closed. ABOUT THE GUEST Paul Rogat Loeb is an American writer and activist who has spent forty years on civic engagement and social change. He is the author of Soul of a Citizen, Generation at the Crossroads, Hope in Hard Times and Nuclear Culture, and the editor of The Impossible Will Take a Little While, now in a revised third edition from Basic Books. He founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project and guides.vote, has lectured at more than 400 campuses, and lives in Seattle. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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  • #3076
    October 24 · 1 hr 1 min

    The South’s Most Successful Export: Joseph Kelly on the Prehistory of American Fascism

    “There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph Kelly INTRO On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie, narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story. The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was the book that the pagan Hitler called his “bible”, and Jim Crow became, in all-too-many ways, a model for the Nazis. “Nostalgia is a way of being modern”, Kelly says. Racialized American fascism took its romantic iconography from the Germanic knights and the Scottish lairds so mocked by Mark Twain. By reaching back into the European Dark Ages, the Confederates imagined they had invented the civilization of the future, one they sought to spread across the Western and Southern Hemispheres. So fascism, for all its fetishization of the volkish nation, is actually an early product of globalization. The biggest lie became the South’s “most successful export” — first shipped to the American North, and later, through Grant and the eugenicists, to Europe. A most unprosperous idea. And, Kelly warns, one that is returning to fashion. The prequel threatens to become the sequel. FURTHER READING • Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915 (Bloomsbury, 21 July 2026). Kelly is professor of English at the College of Charleston and has also written Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War and Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon; he edits the Seagull Reader anthologies for Norton. Biography. • Anthony Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt — yesterday’s episode, and the book Kelly’s argument hands off to. Kelly dates the reversal of the American fascist experiment to 1932; Badger starts there. • Jonathan Rauch on Trump and the f word, and his six key moments. His The Constitution of Knowledge is the source of the phrase Kelly uses at 16:16 for the free press, academic tenure and peer review, and a reformed court system — institutions he argues were built in the 1920s and 1930s specifically to fight a politics founded on lying. Note that AK calls him John Rauch twice on the tape; it is Jonathan. • Susan Neiman, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (Norton), and Andrew Curran, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race, from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson (Other Press) — both previous guests. Curran’s argument that the Enlightenment produced the scientific idea of race is the one AK puts to Kelly at 27:38, and Kelly’s answer inverts it: the culture came first and the science was dressed up afterward. • Ida B. Wells is the figure Kelly builds his final chapter around. Her friend Thomas Moss was lynched after the People’s Grocery affair in Memphis in 1892; her editorial saying that white women slept with black men because they wanted to drew a published threat to castrate the editor, whom the white papers assumed was her male business partner. Her paper was the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, not the Free Press as said on the tape. • The Charleston insurrection of 1822 is the Denmark Vesey conspiracy; Nat Turner’s rebellion followed in Virginia in 1831. Together, in Kelly’s account, they turned William Smith’s crackpot 1820 speech into the South’s governing narrative. • Four things to check against the tape. Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism is usually cited as setting out seven mobilizing passions, not the nine Kelly counts; the two he says did not obtain in the South — the cult leader and the surrender of reason to him — sit in the middle of Paxton’s list rather than at the end. Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” was published in 1946, not 1945. “Seek truth and report it” is the Society of Professional Journalists’ wording, adopted 1996; the 1923 code was the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Canons of Journalism. And at 29:07 Kelly says the first generation told the story “in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties” when he means the 1820s and 1830s — the transcript marks it. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. The summer of 1835. Kelly puts a season on the closing of the Southern mind. After the summer of 1835 you could not stand up in the American South and proclaim that all men are created equal — not and mean it, not and advocate for it. A white person who tried risked violence, risked lynching, and would probably have to live in exile if he got out at all. What follows is almost two generations of white Southerners raised in a one-party state with a tradition of extrajudicial vigilante violence and no free speech, hearing white supremacy from the pulpit, in school and in the newspapers. Mark Twain said he grew up in Missouri and never once heard slavery arraigned by anybody until he left. Historians since the 1970s have called this a Herrenvolk democracy, but Kelly wants the scare quotes: a master-race democracy is a contradiction, because even the master race loses the Bill of Rights. The men who marched off to fight the Union were not lying. They believed it. That is what a lie does once it reaches a certain size. 2. They chose not to look. Asked whether the men who built the lie knew they were lying, Kelly separates the generations. William Smith knew — the founders were still alive and he could have asked them, and would not have liked the answer. But the first American anthropologists were amateurs in the way the first naturalists were amateurs, and their authority came from owning plantations: they were credited because they spent more time around black Americans than the learned societies of Philadelphia did. They took anecdotes and bogus notions, dressed them in scientific language and presented the result to the world as science. Anyone who cared to look hard would hav...

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  • #3075
    October 23 · 1 hr 1 min

    Prosperity Road: Anthony Badger on Hoover, Roosevelt and the Making of the American State

    “Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony Badger Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it. Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long, who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some. In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first half of the 20th century. In 1920, he notes, most Americans’ entire experience of the federal government was the mailman and the occasional man in uniform, and almost nobody paid income tax. By 1945, all Americans had a social security number, worked under the Wagner Act or drew a price support, and lived within sight of a public works project. And they came to trust it. By 1958 some 73 percent told pollsters Washington could be relied on to do the right thing. That trust, Badger dryly notes, is not something that would go on forever. On Herbert Hoover, Badger is a revisionist without being excessively sentimental. The most intelligent president America has ever had, he says of the Stanford-educated engineer. But, like Jimmy Carter, Hoover was a technocrat with little political touch and an excessively thin skin. Not exactly Huey Long. Oddly enough, he is less effusive about Roosevelt. Badger describes him as no intellectual, an actor, a patrician who somehow persuaded working Americans he was on their side. “He’s the first president who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch,” Badger quotes a textile worker on FDR. I asked what we, in 2026, should make of all this. Hoover and FDR were serious people, Badger notes. And they both had a concept of public service that has proved very difficult to recreate in recent years. That said, he reminds us that the New Deal grew out of the near collapse of the country in 1932. So perhaps Prosperity Road hasn’t quite run out of asphalt. Although Anthony Badger is certainly less optimistic about the United States than he was when he fell under the spell of the Kingfish seventy years ago. FURTHER READING • Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt (Harper, 13 October 2026). Kirkus review. Note that Badger has reused his own title: his first book, in 1980, was Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina — so a search on the title alone will return the wrong book. • Badger was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge from 1992 to 2014 and Master of Clare College from 2003 to 2014; he has been a professor at Northumbria since. Read at Sidney Sussex, took his doctorate at Hull in 1974. His Cambridge faculty page. The book on race AK raises at 44:00 is Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (2022); he has also written The New Deal: The Depression Years, FDR: The First Hundred Days and Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life. • Huey Long, the figure who drew Badger into American history, was shot at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge in September 1935 and died two days later — the building AK mentions visiting. • Greg Steinmetz on Roosevelt’s pursuit of Andrew Mellon through the Internal Revenue Service, which Badger calls one of the low points of the administration — that episode. His book is The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government. • The two episodes AK opens on: Janet Reitman on The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist. • Three details worth checking against the tape. J. Edgar Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924; the Bureau was founded in 1908 and renamed the FBI in 1935. The trust figure Badger attributes to Pew comes from the American National Election Studies, which recorded 73 percent in 1958; Pew publishes the series but did not conduct those early surveys. And the “unsordid act” description of Lend-Lease is Churchill’s. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. They had been friends, and then there was the business with the crutches. Badger reconstructs the Hoover–Roosevelt feud as a personal story before it is ever a political one. The two lived near each other in Washington during the First World War and were close enough that Roosevelt praised Hoover privately and publicly, when Hoover was the star of American politics — the humanitarian who fed Belgium, the self-made millionaire engineer who looked like the man of the future. Then the snubs. Hoover denied the president-elect Secret Service protection on leaving office, and at a White House reception Roosevelt was made to stand in a very uncomfortable position while on crutches. Both men were thin-skinned; Hoover, Badger says, was particularly thin-skinned, and he answered the Democrats’ Depression attacks with real anger. 2. The line past which activism became fascism. The most interesting thing about Hoover is not that he did nothing but that he believed in activist government up to a point and could never explain where the point was. Past it, in his own word, intervention became fascistic — and nobody except Hoover was able to locate the line, which is why he looked to contemporaries like a man refusing to act. Badger’s counterfactual is the generous one: had Hoover served the two terms he fully expected, we would remember a reforming president who made government more efficient and the relationship between government and industry more rational. Instead he arrived at the one moment when things went badly, and discovered he could not bear people doubting his sincerity. 3. The welfare state was built by the people Roosevelt hired. Asked who actually built it, Badger does not say Roosevelt. He says Frances Perkins, and adds that it is very difficult to think about the American welfare state without noticing that the experts were women. Social Security brought almost no immediate benefit to anyone, and he finds it remarkable that they were willing to t...

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  • #3074
    October 22 · 45 min

    How to Survive Living Next to Rome: John Ralston Saul on Canada, Trump and the Coming US Civil War

    “Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston Saul As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto. Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche, Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course. Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn. Is Trump an aberration? Not according to Saul who offers Grover Cleveland as the 19th century DJT. Like Stephen Marche, Saul thinks there will be a civil war in the United States within twenty-five years. But he doubts it will be a repeat of the 19th century Civil War of Shermanesque armies against armies. More likely a continuing breakdown of the legal system, and of the willingness of individuals, states and the federal government to obey the law. More like the chaos of Caligula than Caesar vs Pompey. On the tariffs Saul is cheerful. Canada sent half its goods south before the 1988 free trade deal and three quarters after it, he reminds us. So Trump’s tariffs have frightened the Canadian provinces into dismantling the trade barriers they kept against each other. Duh. “We thank him for his stupidity,” Saul says of Grover Trump. John Ralston Saul once wrote a book about Canada entitled A Fair Country. So I suggest a book about America should be called An Unfair Country. He laughs. He’d call it The Great Drama. With perhaps the subtitle: Not As Big As Canada. FURTHER READING • John Ralston Saul writes at his Substack, including the piece in French on a post-Trump America that AK raises at 05:11. He co-founded and co-chairs the Institute for Canadian Citizenship — the organization behind inclusion.ca — with Adrienne Clarkson, and served as International President of PEN from 2009 to 2015, the first Canadian elected to the role. • The books AK asks about: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West was published in 1992, not 1993, and The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World in 2005, not 2018. A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada followed in 2008. Full bibliography. • Chrystia Freeland’s Unreliable Boyfriend (Simon & Schuster, June 2026), the account of Canada–US relations AK quotes twice. The phrase has a history: a British MP used it about Mark Carney when he governed the Bank of England. • Stephen Marche on the possibility of civil war — his episode of this show. His book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022); the phrase AK reaches for at the top is the title of the episode rather than the book. • Kurt Andersen on whether America should break up — that episode. His novel is The Breakup (Penguin Random House, 2026). • On Canada and Europe at 33:13: France’s foreign minister raised the possibility of eventual Canadian membership in March 2026, and an associate-member arrangement has since been floated. Saul thinks full membership is neither likely nor desirable, and expects a negotiated special relationship instead. • Andy Burnham became British prime minister in July 2026, which is the context for the exchange at 36:02 about the UK drifting back toward Europe. • Two numbers worth checking against the tape: Saul gives the EU’s population as 500 million, where it is closer to 450 million, and places Baffin Island as the next island over from Greenland. The narrowest crossing is actually Nares Strait, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, about 26 kilometres across; Baffin lies farther south across Baffin Bay. Neither alters his argument. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. He is sitting where Lester Pearson’s bed used to be. Asked why Carney can take on Trump when other leaders cannot, Saul reaches back to the last prime minister he thinks comparable, and the answer turns out to be literal: Pearson rented the floor of the Toronto house Saul now works in, as a newly married young professor. The parallel is that both arrived with international standing already earned — Pearson the Nobel for Suez before he ever won an election, Carney the Bank of England through a crisis. Pearson had a lisp, wore bow ties, looked professorial, and was, in Saul’s phrase, tough as they come and a great drinker. He also brought in Medicare, which Saul makes concrete: a bone marrow transplant, five weeks in a private room, zero dollars and zero forms. 2. Canada never had its civil war, and he thinks he knows why. He calls Canada the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world, running from 1848 without the internal bloodletting that the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Italy and Spain all went through. His explanation is not national virtue but national calculation: Canadians understood that if they indulged in that kind of violence, the only beneficiary would be the country across the border, because it would leave them weakened. Survival produced restraint. It is the sharpest thing he says about his own country, and it sits directly against his forecast for America. 3. A generation of Canadian executives were trained as branch managers. The part of the tariff story that is harder than tariffs. For a hundred and fifty years, he says, Canada worked at counterbalance — markets and relationships elsewhere so that no single partner could dictate terms. Canada was a serious player in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. That habit was abandoned after 1988, and what replaced it was a business class that became, in effect, subsidiary management: people whose professional question was always what the Americans are doing. Opening doors in Europe and India is the prime minister’s work, and Saul is blunt that the executives who have to walk through them are the wrong people. His prescription is almost quaint: we have...

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  • #3073
    October 21 · 38 min

    What Was America? Katy Siegel and Elise Armani on the Bicentennial We Lost

    “The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel INTRO It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry. What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews, who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration. So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump. “It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia. FURTHER READING • Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument. • Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53. • Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America — published in 2008 rather than recently. • The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology, including Media Burn and the Cadillac Ranch. • On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was Nancy Hanks, who ran the agency from 1969 to 1977 across both the Nixon and Ford administrations and is generally credited with the budget increases Siegel describes. • The federal machinery behind all of this: the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, created by Congress in December 1973 to coordinate locally sponsored events after the original commission concluded there should not be a single national one. Its final report counted 66,484 events and projects between March 1975 and the end of 1976. • Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), raised at 25:40 as the period’s instrument for measuring dread about the pace of change, and the Golden Record, launched in 1977, as the era’s largest time capsule. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. The largest participatory arts event in American history is the one nobody writes about. Their figure is 12,566 official Bicentennial Communities, which the organizers estimated reached 85 percent of the American population. Siegel is explicit that this was the headline finding: art historians are sentimental about the 1930s and the WPA, and five years of research persuaded her that 1976 dwarfs it for scale of cultural participation. The book began not with an argument but with a coincidence — both authors kept finding the same odd reference to the bicentennial in unrelated research, not as a subject for artists so much as an occasion for exhibitions and funding. 2. Benny Andrews read the planning coverage and decided critique was patriotism. Following the preparations in The New York Times in 1969, he worked out that the bicentennial would be the largest national event of the period and that black America would be allotted a thin, stereotyped slice of it. His response was not a single polemical image but a panorama: a six-part cycle, some canvases running to forty feet, 250 works in total. Siegel is careful on the point AK pressed her on — he was a political man and also a major artist, and to him asking what it means to be an American was the most patriotic thing available. 3. A living wage bought the time to participate. Asked whether she envies the generation of 1976, Armani turns the question from temperament to conditions. The agency Siegel describes was underwritten by structural facts: a wage you could live on, the possibility of buying a house, and enough time left after a full-time job to take part in civic life. Artists could work part time and still have hours to give to their communities. She is careful to say the inroad to shaping things feels foreign to her own experience, and that this is not a failure of ambition but a matter of conditions beyond any one person’s power to change — which is a more uncomfortable answer than nostalgia. 4. Nixon built the apparatus he did not care about. The bicentennial spans three presidencies and the book tacks “era” onto its subtitle to say so. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society supplied the premise that America was finally rich enough to extend the Jeffersonian good life to working people. Nixon wanted the celebration centralized and found there was too much distrust of the federal government to allow it, so it was dispersed; he also wanted to outdo Kennedy as the world’s beacon of culture, which is where Siegel locates the contrast with Trump, who wants to undo Obama. The NEA peaked between Ford and Carter, and Reagan could not cut it in his first year because Congress was too fond of it. 5. “Very much a January 6 photo.”

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  • #3072
    October 20 · 51 min

    Hyperscale: Paris Marx on the Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires

    “Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale, the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx, who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself. So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscale, Marx means something very specific. His hyperscalers are multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, who own the computation powering the AI revolution. These are the data center guys. Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t. When ChatGPT arrived, the story was that old big tech leviathans like Google were in trouble. What actually happened, Marx argues, is that these leviathans got permission to hijack the AI revolution. They had the models and data centers. What they didn’t have was cover, because the regulators were watching. Somebody else shipped first, and so the big tech hyperscaler bandwagon became legal. Follow the money, Marx says. Seven trillion dollars invested into data centers by 2030, raised not through government bonds but mostly through corporate ones. Crypto’s collapse only hurt the people who bought crypto. This irrational exuberance will dramatically affect pensions and 401(k)s. So I asked him the multi-trillion-dollar question. If this bet pays off, these companies become more powerful than ever. If not, we are all f&*ked. So, which is worse for a critic: hyperscale’s success, or its failure? Marx is a man of the left. So he favors failure. Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War One to hasten the revolution; Marx, more modestly, suspects that the collapse of the hyperscale pyramid would at least give us the chance to rethink. And then what? Marx wants us to have “conversations” about the type of economy we want. Hyperconversations, more like. Very noisy ones. FURTHER READING • Paris Marx, Hyperscale — published today. Note the two editions carry different subtitles: the US edition is The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires (Crown), while the UK edition is Ambition, Power and the Relentless Rise of Data Empires. It is longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year 2026. Kirkus review. • His podcast Tech Won’t Save Us and his newsletter Disconnect. His previous book is Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, which he returns to at 46:26. • Karen Hao, whom Marx cites in the book as the origin of the imperial framing — her episode of this show, on OpenAI as a classic colonial power. Her book is Empire of AI (AK calls it AI Empires at 06:27). • Robin Wigglesworth on why the bond market, not the stock market, is where the real crisis comes — that episode. His book is A Fabulous Debt. • The $7 trillion figure AK cites at 09:03 traces to McKinsey’s data-centre forecast (about $6.7 trillion of global capital expenditure by 2030), widely reported since. • New York became the first state to pause hyperscale permits, under Executive Order 62 in July 2026 — what it does and does not cover. The AI Data Center Moratorium Act from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez followed in March 2026. • Michael Burry’s short against Nvidia, and his warning of a “1987-type fall” — the position. Nvidia passed $5.5 trillion this month. • The Hugging Face intrusion AK raises at 28:29: an OpenAI agent autonomously breached the platform in July 2026 — Hugging Face’s own technical timeline. Jensen Huang’s response, that labs which cannot control their models should not ship them, came in his Ezra Klein interview. • The International Criminal Court example at 10:05: Microsoft cut off the chief prosecutor’s email after US sanctions in May 2025, and the court has since moved 1,800 workstations off Microsoft — how sanctions weaponise US tech. This is the case underlying the digital-sovereignty white paper Marx co-authored. • SpaceX absorbed xAI in early 2026 ahead of its listing, which is the transformation Marx describes at 04:23 — the deal. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. At least the coal mine made jobs. This is the book at ground level, and the line is his. Data centres arrive expecting a tax package, and the deal communities are offered is worse than the one coal offered, because the jobs do not follow the capital — the construction ends, a skeleton staff remains, and the abatement runs for years. He thinks that bargain is starting to break, and that the opposition it has produced is the most hopeful thing in the story, precisely because it is not ideological: people on the right and the left are showing up to the same planning meetings. 2. The ICC lost its email. The cleanest illustration of what dependency actually means. After the United States sanctioned the International Criminal Court, its chief prosecutor was locked out of his Microsoft account, and the court has since moved some 1,800 workstations off Microsoft entirely. The leverage runs two ways: Washington can reach into an institution it does not control, and the companies can reach into governments that have outsourced their plumbing. This is the case underlying the digital-sovereignty work Marx has been doing outside the book. 3. Why generative AI, and not some other AI. His most original argument after the permission thesis. He says we got models that will answer any query because the people funding them are pursuing a specific end — the replication of the human mind in a machine — and that this is a science-fictional priority rather than an efficient or socially useful one. Another AI programme, aimed at narrower problems, would need a fraction of the computation. The distinction he draws between the men is sharp too: Thiel builds a network of people who move his politics for him, while Musk needs to be seen doing it. 4. Nvidia is the pure play, which is the problem. Asked whether Nvidia ...

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  • #3071
    October 19 · 44 min

    The Hope Machine (Holy Shit, My Life is Over): Bill Gross Gives Away 1.2 Million AI-Generated Ideas

    “My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross INTRO Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away. “Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought. Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea. His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bill’s own system scored it 8.9 out of 10 against 32,000 rivals. The business model inverts the usual one. Entrepreneurs pay nothing. Corporates with large R&D budgets and fat patent portfolios license the platform to mine their own IP, and they fund the giveaway. Universities are next. Bill is talking to one that would pay students fifty thousand dollars to come and build a company, rather than charging them fifty thousand to study one. As Chris Marquis argued in yesterday’s New York Times, business school as we once imagined it is over. So where does the hope machine come in? I asked Bill whether the MAGA crowd might object to an American giving away his best ideas to the rest of the world. He was unmoved. Idealab AI is defiantly global from day one, and he is most excited about its power in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where young people and ideas are abundant. “Bill, this is a hope machine,” thus exclaimed Ahmed El Alfi, the founder of the Flat6Labs accelerator in Cairo, having come to Pasadena to get a sneak preview. I asked Bill what the machine can’t do. “Judgment,” he said. Which means mentors, advisors and investors matter more now, not less. But what about questions from interviewers? Hmmm. Holy shit, my life is over. Maybe Uncle Bill can build me a question machine. FURTHER READING • Idealab AI launched on the day of recording. Bill gave the address on air as idealab.ai and his own email as bill@idealab.ai. The thirty-year parent company is at idealab.com, and his 25 Lessons from 25 Years of Idealab is the long-form version of the methodology he has now handed to a model. • Bill’s 2015 TED talk on timing as the single biggest predictor of startup success, which he refers to at 25:55 — watch it. He says the new platform now does this analysis automatically. • On the IP argument at 17:58: ProRata.ai, his venture to make AI companies pay publishers a revenue share, raised $40m and launched Gist in September 2025. • Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic, whom AK raises at 08:39, on the risk AI poses to democracy — listen to that episode, and his book AI and Political Freedom (Princeton, 2026). • Richard Socher on AI that can think for itself, raised at 41:24 — Eureka in Silicon Valley. His book is The Eureka Machine (PublicAffairs, 2026). • The thousand-dollar-a-month AI habit and the lens cap, from last week’s editorial with Keith Teare. • The premise of the gas-hedging idea: the Strait of Hormuz has been closed or severely restricted since late February 2026, Iran insists it remains closed, and shipping traffic has only partly recovered — the fuel crisis in detail. • Aptera, the streamlined electric car he names as his best-known failure, actually wound down in December 2011, not during the 2008–09 recession as he says at 25:55. • “Bill, this is a hope machine” is Ahmed El Alfi, who founded Sawari Ventures in Cairo and the Flat6Labs accelerator that has seeded several hundred startups across the Arab world. He visited Pasadena, saw the platform, and supplied the title of this episode at 22:44. • On the universities at 19:29: Christopher Marquis, a previous guest on this show, published “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down” in the New York Times the day before this conversation was recorded. He argues that HBS-style case studies are corporate-approved narratives rather than research, and that business schools train students to practise being the person in charge rather than to be sceptical of them. He was last on in November 2025 — Strategic Hibernation. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. Why this only works now, and did not a year ago. The origin is a Wall Street Journal piece on the copper shortage — data centres needing transformers faster than they can be made, electric cars needing motors — which made him notice that most articles carry a problem statement at their core. The mechanism is cross-pollination: a model holding problems, technologies and expired patents in one context at once can collide a decades-old financial instrument with a two-week-old crisis. He is emphatic that this is new. A year ago, he says, the models simply were not good enough to do it, and everything that makes the platform possible has arrived since. 2. Nobody tested the best idea the machine made. The gas-hedging app is the strongest thing in the hour and also the least examined. He is right that the cleverness is in the combination: airline hedging has existed for decades, consumer access has not. But a product that guarantees a future price in exchange for a fixed premium is insurance, and five dollars a month does not fund protection against unbounded upside — nor does selling it avoid the regulators who supervise both insurance and retail derivatives. His own system ranked it first out of 32,000 without surfacing any of that, which is a sharper illustration of his judgment argument than anything he says about judgment. 3. He insists he has no moat, and appears to mean it. Asked the standard Silicon Valley question, he refuses the premise: he wants to be copied, a...

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  • #3070
    October 18 · 54 min

    Murder by the Numbers: Harold Schechter’s 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime

    Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler investigating the gruesome murder of two young women. Today’s guest has spent four decades investigating homicidal crimes and continues to have the time of his life. Harold Schechter has written more than thirty true crime books, his latest being Murder by the Numbers, an account of 199 chilling tales of true crime. When it comes to crime, I asked the Queens, NY–based Schechter, is America special? On the murder rate, yes. He was just in Iceland, where he asked a retired homicide detective whether the country had ever had a serial killer. Oh yes, the man said. Around 1325. Some Viking. The difference is firearms, Schechter argues, and a frontier that closed within living memory. But, he says, the appetite for murder isn’t uniquely American. Martin Dumollard was guillotined in a French village in 1862 before a crowd three times the size of the town. During the Terror, tradesmen sold guillotine earrings to the women and toy guillotines to the children, who took them home and decapitated squirrels. Schechter is unimpressed by our current media panic over violent videos. He reminds us that Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend, was blamed on dime novels. The Great Train Robbery was blamed for juvenile crime. Then radio, then television, then Psycho, then American Psycho, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, after which there was no detectable surge in chainsaw massacres. Manson took his cue from the White Album, Lennon’s killer from Holden Caulfield, Hinckley from Taxi Driver. And if one book has inspired more killers than any other, he says, it is the Bible. What about gender — are all serial killers male? Schechter’s argument is that we count female serial killers differently. They poison their victims, often enjoying the deaths in real time. And they tend to kill family and children rather than strangers. Women like watching too. The audience for a trial about a mother who killed her children is usually overwhelmingly female, he notes. So what about gentle Harold Schechter? Could he kill, I asked. Or is he the kind of guy who only likes to watch? FURTHER READING • Harold Schechter, Murder by the Numbers: 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime (Workman, 6 October 2026). • Matt Kessler on the murders of JB Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch. • The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on 30 September 2026, which AK raises at 39:07 — what happened. Schechter’s reply supplies the context: by Austin Sarat’s count in Gruesome Spectacles, there were 276 botched executions in the United States between 1890 and 2010. • The Hegseth proposal to broadcast the execution of the Fort Hood gunman, and Pope Leo’s condemnation of the death penalty — the live news behind the public-execution discussion at 10:58. • Schechter’s Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment makes the dime-novel argument at length, and Deviant, Deranged and Fiend are the Ed Gein, Albert Fish and Jesse Pomeroy books he mentions. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. He splits the question in two, and gives opposite answers. Is America exceptional in its murder rate? Yes, flatly, and he puts it down to firearms and to how recently the frontier closed — Wyatt Earp was still alive when Ford reached Hollywood. Is America exceptional in its appetite for murder stories? No, and he is firm about that too. Iceland has almost no homicide and a flourishing market in gory crime fiction, to the point that its novelists struggle to find plausible killings to write about. The guns are American. The fascination is human. 2. The taste for watching people die is not a modern decline. When Martin Dumollard, often called France’s first serial killer, was guillotined in 1862, three times the population of the village turned out. During the Terror, tradesmen worked the crowds selling guillotine earrings to women and toy guillotines to children, who took them home to decapitate squirrels. Schechter’s reading of this is unexpectedly optimistic: that we now settle for virtual representations of violence rather than the real thing is, he thinks, evidence of civilisation rather than its collapse. 3. True crime has always sold titillation as moral instruction. The genre begins in America with the gallows sermon, printed after a public hanging and carrying the condemned prisoner’s supposed last words, his repentance and his discovery of God. It also carried, invariably, a very detailed account of what he had done. Schechter traces the same bargain through three centuries of the form and declines to make it himself: he says he does not try to draw moral lessons from the cases he writes about. 4. No new medium has ever been shown to raise the murder rate. Dime novels were blamed for Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend. Newspapers blamed juvenile crime on The Great Train Robbery. Then radio, television, Psycho, American Psycho — and no wave of chainsaw massacres followed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. What actually sets people off, he says, is unpredictable and usually benign: Manson had the White Album, Lennon’s killer had Holden Caulfield, Hinckley had Taxi Driver. His own candidate for the book that has inspired the most killers is the Bible, and he means it literally — he has written about many who believed they were following the Old Testament. 5. Female serial killers were never rare, only counted differently. Because the term was coined to describe a kind of sexual homicide, the canonical killers are all men. Women kill by poison, which carries an Arsenic and Old Lace quaintness that Schechter thinks badly misleading. Jack the Ripper killed quickly and mutilated the corpses afterwards; a poisoner can stretch a death over weeks and watch it happen. Jane Toppan, whom he has written about, confessed to thirty-one murders and held the Guinness record until Gacy. The other difference is the victims: women overwhelmingly kill family, children and acquaintances rather than strangers. ABOUT THE GUEST Harold Schechter is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, CUNY, where he taught American literature, myth and folklore for more than forty years. A two-time Edgar nominee, he has written over thirty books on true crime, among them Deviant (Ed Gein), Deranged (Albert Fish), Fiend (Jesse Pomeroy), Savage Pastimes, Murderabilia and 50 States of Murder. He lives in Queens, New York. Murder by the Numbers is published by Workman. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA <...

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  • #3069
    October 17 · 52 min

    Murders in the Wiregrass: Matt Kessler on DNA, Doubt and the Deep South

    Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was burned down for telling the truth about Jim Crow. Today we go south-west into Alabama, to Ozark, in the Wiregrass, the boondocks of the boondocks — a region named for a scrub that grows where nothing else will. Except for murder. The Wiregrass, as the Birmingham, Alabama–based journalist Matt Kessler explains, has poor soil, no cotton, almost no plantations, and therefore, none of the southern decorum either. He has spent nine years there researching The Wiregrass, a new true-crime investigation into a case nobody has satisfactorily explained. On 31 July 1999, JB Beasley turned seventeen. She and her friend Tracie Hawlett set out from the Alabama town of Dothan (peanut capital of the world) to go party-hopping in the Wiregrass. Searching for a field party with a keg, the two young women got lost. They stopped at a closed filling station in Ozark to use the payphone, and someone gave them directions that didn’t sound suspicious. “Right out of the lot, left at the McDonald’s.” The surveillance tape shows them leaving in the right direction. Their car was found by the roadside the next morning. At two in the afternoon somebody finally opened the trunk. Both girls were inside, shot in the head. Southern gothic murders most foul. So what happened? The bodies sat in that trunk for five hours in a steaming Alabama summer, before an officer from out of town had the smart idea to open it. Trained officers then searched the car without gloves. A lead investigator tried to tow it back to Dothan, which would have destroyed the crime scene. Years later the car was quietly released and resold, with no paperwork stating who authorised it. A man named Johnny Barrentine confessed and was let go when the DNA did not match. And when Kessler rang the Ozark police for the file, he was told that everything before 2000 had been “accidentally” destroyed. Oops. Twenty years on, a genetic genealogy search matched semen from the scene to Coley McCraney, a married preacher with no criminal record. He was convicted on four counts of capital murder in 2023 and is now serving life without parole. McCraney admitted to the sex, but denied the killing. The DNA is the only material evidence since nobody found a weapon. Kessler believes in his innocence, and suspects the police are implicated, though the officer he calls a person of interest will stay unnamed until you buy the book. Ah, the South. FURTHER READING • Matt Kessler, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South (Grand Central, 6 October 2026). Kirkus calls it “a meticulous, urgent account of a case officially closed, but far from settled.” • The official record, against which his account should be read: the Alabama Attorney General’s statement on McCraney’s sentencing in June 2023, following conviction on four counts of capital murder. • In September 2024 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction. The defence had argued that Rena Crumb should have been allowed to testify that an Ozark officer, not McCraney, killed the girls — the same account Kessler describes here. Crumb subsequently recanted, and the judge ruled her evidence hearsay. The case is now before the Alabama Supreme Court. • Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith and the Georgia side of the same story, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. The reporting is far stronger than the theory it is marshalled behind. The most valuable hour of this conversation is the texture, and it is first-hand: a Klansman soliciting donations on the town square in the eighties like the Salvation Army; black families teaching their children to carry what they called driving around money for the inevitable bogus stop; locals pressing handguns and window-shattering hammers on a reporter they thought was in danger for asking questions. None of this requires anyone to accept his conclusion. It establishes something narrower and more damning, which is that this was not a department capable of investigating anything. 2. The investigation failed at almost every point where it could fail. The bodies lay in a closed trunk for five hours in high summer before an officer from Dothan, there on his own initiative, opened it — several whistleblowers told Kessler that any experienced investigator would have known what he was smelling. Local officers then searched the vehicle without gloves. One tried to tow it to another jurisdiction. The heat destroyed the evidence so thoroughly that no time of death could be established. Some years later the car itself was released and sold, and no document records who authorised that. Kessler says he cannot tell whether this is incompetence or concealment, which is the honest answer. 3. A pattern of police sexual coercion runs underneath the case. A Police Explorers programme at the local high school, nominally training juniors and seniors for the job, was shut down by an incoming deputy chief because officers had been sleeping with the students. A school administrator told Kessler of pupils arriving in his office in tears after officers traded bogus speeding tickets for sexual favours. During the reporting, the police chief and a supervisor were forced out over coercing the wives of officers on parole. AK’s question is the sharp one: whether two girls from the bigger town simply refused to play along. 4. The conviction rests on DNA and almost nothing else. A genetic genealogy search of the kind that caught the Golden State Killer led police to Coley McCraney, who gave a sample voluntarily and was arrested for double murder and rape. There is no weapon and no other material evidence. Put on the stand by his own lawyer against his wishes, he placed himself in the girls’ car and could not satisfactorily account for the evening seventeen years earlier. Kessler accepts the DNA is his and argues the encounter was consensual, which is where his real intellectual claim sits: that DNA at a scene is accepted prima facie as guilt without anyone asking what it actually shows. 5. He accuses the police, and is candid that he cannot finish the sentence. Asked directly what happened, he says he believes a local officer was involved, names one as a person of interest, and then declines to identify him on air — you will have to read the book. He is scrupulous about the rival theory, having found nothing in a quarter of a million files to support the rumour that the girls stumbled onto a drug flight. Listeners should know what the hour does not mention: Rena Crumb, whose secondhand account of a drunken confession is central here, later recanted, and the appeals court that upheld the conviction in 2024 ruled her evidence hearsay....

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  • #3068
    October 16 · 53 min

    The Six Minute War: Michael Dobbs on Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon

    On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight, was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs. He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic crisis of the Cold War. It happened in 1983. In September of that year, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, among them the most anti-communist member of the United States Congress. A few weeks later a Soviet early-warning computer reported that America had launched its missiles, and a colonel named Petrov, alone in a bunker at one in the morning, decided on his own authority that the machine was lying. In November NATO ran a nuclear release exercise called Able Archer, which Moscow took for the real thing. The difference between 1962 and 1983, Dobbs says, was twenty years of technology. Kennedy had thirteen days. Reagan, by his own estimate in his memoirs, would have had six minutes. Thus the title of his new book, The Six Minute War, subtitled Reagan, Russia and the Race to Automate Armageddon. As the incoming Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, Dobbs had a front seat on the crisis. He arrived in Moscow just after the airliner came down, and his best material is anecdotal. He saw Russians bussed to a state-organised protest outside the American embassy, chanting on cue while jealously eyeing the Buicks and Cadillacs parked on the street. In a Moscow cinema showing Three Days of the Condor as anti-American propaganda, he watched the audience gasp — not at the dastardly CIA, but at the lavish contents of Robert Redford’s fridge. Fast forward to today, and we get to the most worrying part of Dobbs’ analysis. The presidential crisis historian reckons we are now in a more dangerous period than at any point he can remember. We have more weapons, less warning, with our split-second decisions dependent on machines whose reasoning is increasingly hard for us humans to understand. Call the compounding annual risk one per cent. Multiply it across thirty years and the arithmetic isn’t reassuring. We might now be just a few seconds to midnight. FURTHER READING • Michael Dobbs, The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon (Simon & Schuster) • His Cuban Missile Crisis book, One Minute to Midnight (2008) — the thirteen days against which he measures the six minutes. Down with Big Brother and Six Months in 1945 complete his Cold War trilogy. • The National Security Archive’s declassified sourcebook on Able Archer 83 — the NATO exercise the Kremlin read as cover for a first strike. • Eliot Cohen made the companion argument on this show: that the nuclear danger now sits with Pakistan and North Korea rather than Moscow and Washington. Listen or watch. • Harold James’s essay “Late Soviet America”, the gerontocracy parallel AK raises at 25:26 — among his Project Syndicate columns. FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. The headline is about now, not 1983. The historian who wrote the definitive account of the Cuban Missile Crisis says we are in a more dangerous period today than at any point in his memory of the Cold War, as a child or later as a reporter. His reasoning is that the warheads have proliferated, the warning times have been compressed, and the decisions are moving to computers whose workings we cannot inspect. The Cold War at least had a rough nuclear balance between two systems that understood each other. He is more frightened for his grandchildren than he was at the tensest moments he lived through. 2. What changed between 1962 and 1983 was twenty years of technology. Kennedy and Khrushchev had thirteen days to argue their way out of Cuba, which now looks almost leisurely. By 1983 bombers had given way to missiles and computers had entered the early-warning chain, and Reagan wrote in his memoirs that he might have six minutes to decide whether a blip on a screen was the end of the world. That line is where the book’s title comes from. Dobbs is candid that there was no six-minute war: the compression of time is the subject, not an event. 3. A Soviet colonel is the reason this is a book about automation. At one in the morning in the autumn of 1983, Soviet satellites and computers reported an American missile launch, and Colonel Petrov had to decide whether to pass it up the chain as real. He had written some of the algorithms himself and knew they could be wrong, and he reasoned that nobody opens a surprise attack with five missiles rather than two hundred. So he called it a false alarm on his own authority. Dobbs’s point is not that Petrov was a hero but that somebody else in that chair might have answered differently. 4. Reagan was the most anti-nuclear president since the bomb was invented. This is the claim least appreciated at the time and the one Dobbs presses hardest. The man denouncing the evil empire was also reading the Bible for prophecies of Armageddon and was genuinely tormented by the possibility of nuclear war, which is why he later stunned his own advisers at Reykjavik by proposing to abolish nuclear weapons outright. Asked which Reagan to believe, Dobbs refuses to choose: both were real, the militant anti-communist and the pragmatist who found someone he could deal with in Gorbachev. 5. Nobody starts a nuclear war on purpose, which is the frightening part. In both 1962 and 1983 the danger was never a deliberate first strike but an accident that escalates past the point where anyone can stop it — a stray airliner, a faulty algorithm, an exercise misread as cover. Andropov told the former ambassador Averell Harriman exactly that in the Kremlin, and Dobbs thinks it remains true with Pakistan, North Korea and now AI added to the mix. His prescription sounds modest and is not: elect sensible leaders, keep talking to the other side, and practise the empathy that let Kennedy ask what the world looked like from Khrushchev’s chair. ABOUT THE GUEST Michael Dobbs is a presidential crisis historian and a former foreign correspondent and Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, where he launched the paper’s Fact Checker column in 2007. He reported from Moscow through the 1983 war scare and was there in August 1991 when Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank. His Cold War trilogy comprises Down with Big Brother, One Minute to Midnight and Six Months in 1945; he is also the author of King Richard, The Unwanted, Saboteurs and a ...

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  • #3067
    October 15 · 40 min

    The Last Humans: Alexander Wendt on UFOs, Global Security and the Threat to State Sovereignty

    Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt, argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time. While the Pentagon has conceded only that the objects are real and that it cannot identify them, Wendt extrapolates further. A recognition of the presence of UFOs would bring, he warns, both a crisis of global security and the demise of the traditional state system. Worst of all, he fears, would be a descent into a Hobbesian-style war-against-all. Wendt is less worried about the invasion of the earth by little green men. If they had wanted to attack, he says, they would have done it when we fought with sticks rather than nukes. Instead, he worries about the social contract we have with the state. We obey the laws of the state because they keep us safe. Spacecraft that the Pentagon cannot identify, in airspace the Pentagon can’t defend, would leave that contract in tatters. What follows is not war with aliens but Hobbes’s great fear of a return to his dreaded state of nature. So, as Wendt notes, “the threat of UFOs is not them. It’s actually us.” Rather than a new religion, they represent an old nightmare. Beam me up, Thomas Hobbes. FURTHER READING • Alexander Wendt, The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, out 15 October 2026) • Adam Kirsch on We Want to Believe — the case that this is a religion, not a security problem: listen or watch • Wendt’s 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”, the piece that launched constructivism, and his Social Theory of International Politics — both listed at his Mershon Center page • The June 2021 Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the report that, on Wendt’s account, changed the game FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. His thesis is that the danger is on our side of the encounter. He separates the craft from the question of who is flying them, and says the Defense Department has settled the first — after seventy-five years of denial it changed its mind, which he finds significant. On the second he is agnostic but unworried about attack: anything capable of getting here could have destroyed us long ago, when we were far weaker. The threat he describes is political. Our civilisation is organised around the assumption that we are alone, and the discovery that we are not would expose a state that cannot identify these objects, cannot stop them entering its airspace, and cannot protect anyone from them. That is the emperor with no clothes, and what it threatens is allegiance. 2. What he actually fears is Hobbes, not invasion. Once the news is out, people will disagree about what to do — shoot them down, worship them, ignore them — and there is no way to settle the argument, because nobody can get inside the craft to find out who is right. Disagreement with no arbiter is the oldest problem in political philosophy and the one Hobbes built the state to solve. His worst case is not conquest from outside but an implosion from within, which is why he thinks disclosure handled too quickly and too casually would itself be dangerous. 3. The title has three meanings, and the third is the interesting one. We could be the last humans physically, if they exterminate us. We could be the last biologically, if the hybridisation programme described by alien abduction experiencers is real. Or we could be the last in what he calls an experiential sense — the last people who will ever know what it was like to believe we were alone in the universe. He thinks the third is much the most realistic, calls it sad and potentially uplifting at once, and notes that in all three cases the anthropocentric world we have built does not survive. 4. It is bad news for America and possibly less bad for China. A country accustomed to sitting on top of the international system has the furthest to fall, and every scenario he sketches makes the United States smaller: against a superior intelligence the gap between the strongest state and the rest stops mattering. On China he is openly speculating, but the thought is that a more collectivist culture has more cohesion and loyalty to draw on in a shock like this, where an individualistic one has people going every which way. His guess is that Washington and Beijing would try to cooperate, and that the real question is whether either can keep a grip on its own population. 5. The UFOs are the occasion; the argument is about constructivism. The most fluent stretch of the hour has nothing to do with aliens. Wendt explains why idealism became a slur in international relations after Munich, how realism and then liberalism replaced it, and where his own school came from — sociologists rather than economists, George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman rather than rational choice. His 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” argued that the international system has no single logic and that everything depends on what actors do with it. That is the claim this book applies to the strangest case available. ABOUT THE GUEST Alexander Wendt is Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, and a founder of the constructivist school of international relations. He is the author of Social Theory of International Politics and of the 1992 article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It". In the 2017 TRIP survey his peers named him the most influential scholar in international relations of the previous twenty years. He shared the 2023 Skytte Prize in Political Science and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025. The Last Humans is published by Oxford University Press. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.

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  • #3066
    October 14 · 43 min

    Super Unsexy By Design: Ben Green on Algorithmic Realism

    “We don’t have to choose between AI and no AI. The bigger choice is what type of AI we want, and who we want in control of it.” — Ben Green INTRO In our age of AI, do we want to be ruled by all-knowing engineer kings? Not according to Ben Green, a professor of information and public policy at Michigan, whose new book, Algorithmic Realism, presents “data science practices to promote social justice”. Unsexy? Yes. And that, according to Green, is the whole point of algorithmic realism. Such a down-to-earth use of AI is super unsexy by design, he explains. Green’s critique is of Silicon Valley utopians who promote an algorithmic formalism. So he’s dismissive of the idea of “superintelligence” with its promise of curing cancer at the snap of a finger. He borrows from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright the idea of real utopias reached concretely, step-by-step. So he’s not exactly against algorithmic idealism. Just the lazy type that sees the world as an infinitely scalable laboratory. Green describes working as a data scientist for the city of Boston and being asked to cut EMS response times. Instead of building some sort of super sexy algorithm, he went and talked to people, and found what was actually driving the call volume: mental illness, addiction and homelessness. Shaving two minutes off an ambulance would have done nothing for any of those people. What they built instead — and he is careful to stress the they — was a team trained to handle someone in a crisis and connect them to counselling and shelter. Super unsexy; and super useful. FURTHER READING • Ben Green, Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice (MIT Press, 2026) • His earlier book, The Smart Enough City — the same argument, made about city government in 2019 • Green on DOGE: “Using AI to Reform Government Is Much Harder Than It Looks”, at Tech Policy Press • My own case for the engineer kings, three days ago: Crowning Our Engineer Kings • Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic on AI and Political Freedom — the inside-the-lab answer that Green doubts: listen or watch • Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy — the humanist case on AI: listen or watch • Stephen Witt, Jensen Huang’s biographer, on the engineer king par excellence: listen or watch FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. The engineer’s mindset is the thing he is actually arguing with. Not engineering itself, which he wants more of, but a particular habit of mind: that problems have neat optimal solutions, that facts and reason settle things, and that building more powerful tools will of itself improve society. What that leaves out is power — who gets to decide, what their incentives are, and whether the decision might be worth democratising. He puts the underlying assumption plainly: our goal is to build more and more powerful tools, and as our tools get more powerful they will inevitably work for the betterment of society. He thinks that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology and social impact are related. 2. He does not think you can fix it from inside the labs. Pressed twice on whether well-intentioned people at Anthropic and OpenAI can do good with their engineering brains, he gave the same answer both times. The companies are pushing as hard as they can towards superintelligence and, in OpenAI’s case, an enormous IPO, and in that setting safety is treated as a public-relations and liability problem rather than a deeply held ambition. He points to the recent run of departures and whistleblowing, and to reporting that engineers raising safety concerns were ignored. There are many well-intentioned people there; the business decisions lead. 3. An ambulance in Boston is his best argument. Working as a data scientist for the city, he was asked to improve emergency medical response times, and the obvious move was an algorithm that would optimise ambulance deployment and save a couple of minutes per incident. Instead he spent the time building relationships with the people doing the work, and found that the rising call volume was being driven by mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness. Optimising deployment would have left every one of those people exactly where they were. What came out of it instead was a new team, trained to handle someone in a moment of crisis and connect them to counselling, social services and shelter. Still data science — he did a great deal of analysis — but aimed at the problem rather than the metric. 4. He wants narrow AI, and he is rude about scale. There is, he argues, a very tenuous relationship between a system that tops a benchmark and a system that is useful to anyone in practice. The labs are chasing the first; what helps people is the second, tailored to a particular use. His unglamorous example from the city-government years is cleaning up your data, because most organisations have messy, disorganised datasets and nothing works on top of those. He is similarly unsparing about the money burned on what he calls token maxing over the past year. And on the American strategy of simply building bigger: our sausage factory is more powerful than your sausage factory, which he regards as shortsighted industrial policy. 5. Utopia is fine; the missing part is the route. He is not a fan of effective altruism but says he is not against utopian thinking at all — the book that shaped this one most was Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias. What he objects to is the shape of the labs’ promise: that AI will cause enormous disruption and then, somehow, universal basic income and the end of disease and climate change will follow. No pathway, just the promise dangled in front of us. Wright’s term for what is missing is accessible way stations. So his own ambition is radical and his steps are deliberately small: what one person or one organisation can actually do, this month, in the job they already have. ABOUT THE GUEST Ben Green is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. He has worked as a data scientist for the City of Boston and writes on algorithms in government for Tech Policy Press. His previous book, The Smart Enough City, was published in 2019. Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice is published by MIT Press. ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by And...

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  • #3065
    October 13 · 48 min

    Eliot Cohen is The Strategist: How to Think About War & Politics

    Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats would have done the same. While he was in favour of the Iraq adventure, he does admit that he never asked hard enough questions about whether America’s institutions were fit for that kind of war. His new book, The Strategist, is a short introduction to thinking about war and politics. So is Cohen a realist or idealist when it comes to thinking about international relations? There are two kinds of people in this world, he responded, half jokingly, people who divide things into two and people who don’t. And given Cohen’s distrust of what he calls “purely linear descriptions of history where it’s all one thing or another”, he’s unambiguously in the latter category. So who are the great strategists in history from whom we should learn about war and politics? For Cohen, Churchill ranks high, as does Lincoln. And how do contemporary American “statesmen” like Hegseth and Trump compare? “It’s like you’re dealing with two different species,” Cohen dryly notes. There’s one question I half regret not asking. Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, is full of stories about people that the forever wars broke. Like the angry ex-Marine who was transformed into a leading neo-Nazi. So perhaps I should have asked Cohen about the human costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. If 21st-century America is to avoid more overseas tragedies, must the strategist also be a moralist? History isn’t so linear, he would probably have replied. As he says at the beginning of The Strategist: “you may wish to be done with war, but war is not done with you.” FURTHER READING • Eliot A. Cohen, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics (Princeton University Press) • His weekly podcast with Eric Edelman, Shield of the Republic • Janet Reitman on The Inheritance — the five-act American tragedy Cohen declines to sign up to: listen or watch • Elliot Ackerman on The Fifth Act, another five-act tragedy of how the Afghan war ended: listen or watch • Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a much harder line on George W. Bush than Cohen: listen or watch FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. He will not call the whole thing a blunder, and he explains why. Asked straight out whether he shares Janet Reitman’s view that American foreign policy after 9/11 was one long miscalculation, he declined to comment on a book he hasn’t read and then gave the historian’s answer. A complicated mix. A great deal of miscalculation, which nobody can deny, and also some things that were successes. His objection is methodological as much as political: judgments made at the time always get amended by longer perspectives, and he dislikes purely linear accounts of history in which everything is one thing or another. He supported the Iraq war, says so in the new book and at length in an earlier one, and the place he faults himself is narrow and specific — he never asked rigorously enough whether American organisations were fit for that kind of war. 2. Realists and idealists is a distinction he thinks is useless. He took a doctorate in political science and then went off it, because the categories appeal to what he calls minds that swing on hinges. There is no pure realist and no pure idealist; what actually happens is that people’s values colour how they see the world, so the two are never separable. Churchill is his example of the mix — the man who identified Hitler years before his colleagues did, and the man who cut a deal with Stalin over Poland that he hated making. That is what conducting a country’s affairs in wartime is like: caught between what you would like to do and what the world will let you do. 3. Lincoln is his greatest American strategist, and had no military experience at all. Thirty days in the Black Hawk War, no fighting, and a famous moment when he marched his platoon up to a rail fence, could not remember the order for turning a column, and simply told them to fall out and fall in on the other side. What Lincoln had instead was a grip on human nature and what Cohen calls profound common sense. He does not think common sense can be taught — pressed on whether it is innate, he said that was a philosophical question and he didn’t know enough to answer it. What he did try to teach at Johns Hopkins was judgment, which he defines as learning to ask questions, listen carefully to the answers, and then ask some more. Along with how to write a clear memorandum, which he insists is not a mundane skill. 4. Rice hired him to tell her things she didn’t want to hear, and he did. Reading the North Korean estimates he decided something was squirrelly, laid out the evidence that Pyongyang was cheating on its plutonium declaration, and was given licence to go hunting. He came back with the circumstantial case for a covert uranium enrichment programme. The assistant secretary negotiating the agreement asked sarcastically whether he imagined somebody would walk into a building in Pyongyang and find a blast door opening onto spinning centrifuges — which is more or less what happened when Siegfried Hecker visited Yongbyon some time later. He also told her Afghanistan was in far worse shape than the briefings claimed, having unpacked a reassuring statistic and found it bogus. Earlier still, he told President Bush in the Oval Office that the wrong general was commanding in Iraq, and named David Petraeus as the replacement. He says he only found the nerve because his son was deploying as an infantry officer. 5. The useful question about a war is not how it ends but when it began. This is his wife’s idea, borrowed from her work running a photographic archive: every photograph is a double crop, in space and in time, and so is every war. Where you start the clock changes what you think the war is. The Iran war, on his reading, began in 1979 with the founding of a republic organised around hostility to the United States, and everything since is another campaign in it. Ukraine began in 2022 if you are reading the headlines, 2014 if you are Ukrainian, around 1990 if you are Vladimir Putin. He applies the same test to the Second World War — a continuation of 1914, or a new war against the Nazis beginning in 1933 — and says the answer changes how you fight and, more importantly, how you handle the end. ABOUT THE GUEST Eliot A. Cohen holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Cente...

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  • #3064
    October 12 · 46 min

    An American Tragedy in Five Acts: Janet Reitman on the Inheritance of 9/11

    “They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet Reitman Back in 2022, the ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman came on the show to talk about The Fifth Act, his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, also imagines post-9/11 America as a tragedy in five acts. But, in contrast with Ackerman’s military account, The Inheritance is an American story, focusing on what Reitman sees as the tragic fate of the country since September 11, 2001. Reitman watched the towers come down from her Brooklyn rooftop and later found pieces of American Airlines in-flight meals that had drifted across the river and landed in front of her building. She is unambiguous about what came next. The world was with America, she reminds us, but instead we sought violent, often irrational revenge. She was in Iraq on bases displaying NEVER FORGET posters for a war that had nothing to do with the thing we weren’t supposed to forget. To understand post-9/11 America, Reitman borrows George Packer’s method of quilting individual stories into a single narrative. So she writes about people like Nathan Damigo, a Marine who went to Iraq to avenge 9/11, came home with a condition the Corps denied existed, self-medicated, was cut loose without his benefits, went to prison, and concluded in his cell that the only family he could count on was his white race. So he founded Identity Evropa and became one of the leaders at Charlottesville. While Reitman sees an American tragedy in a square-jawed veteran like Damigo, she doesn’t present him as a victim. Other characters in Reitman’s story are idealists — an FBI agent who leaks information because he believes citizens ought to know, a lawyer who spends twenty years defending Muslim clients — and not one of them, she says, regrets their choices. Much might have fallen on 9/11, but not individual agency. So while this post-9/11 history might be tragic, Janet Reitman’s The Inheritance remains a classically American story. FURTHER READING • Janet Reitman, The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts (Random House, 2026) • Anand Giridharadas’s review in The New York Times — “How 9/11 Created a Nation of Fear” • George Packer, whose The Unwinding is the model for this kind of non-fiction narrative, on his turn to fiction with The Emergency: listen or watch • Kurt Andersen on The Breakup — the other distinguished chronicler of American unravelling who has shifted to fiction: listen or watch • Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a harder line on George W. Bush than his recent press has: listen or watch • The CDC on American exhaustion — 71.5% of American adults report fatigue FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. There was another road, and she is certain we could have taken it. This is the claim the whole book rests on, and she states it without hedging: she is a hundred per cent in the camp that says the response was a catastrophic overreaction. In the weeks after the attacks the world was overwhelmingly with America, and the option on the table was to ask seriously why so much of the non-Western world did not love it — a question that was answered instead with “they hate us for our freedom”, which she calls a non-answer. What we chose was revenge, in Afghanistan, which can at least be connected to 9/11, and then in Iraq, which cannot. She was there in 2004 and 2005 and remembers the posters on remote bases: images of the towers collapsing above the words NEVER FORGET, in a war the soldiers themselves largely knew had nothing to do with it. 2. The worst thing the Bush administration did was on the home front. Her book is not another deconstruction of the political decisions — she says there are plenty of those. What interests her is the arrangement whereby a very small number of people went to fight and everybody else was told to go shopping. Literally to go shopping, and to football games, and to thank people for their service. She describes those as performative patriotic acts that had the effect of insulating the country from what was being done in its name, and she notes that the soldiers she still keeps in touch with always hated being thanked, because the thanks were never followed by help with a job, housing or a medical bill. The other half of it was fear, deliberately spread, then institutionalised, then internalised — and she hears the same rhetoric recycled now, about Iran and a bomb that might one day be dropped. 3. Nathan Damigo is the line from Iraq to Charlottesville. He joined the Marines believing he would bring democracy to Iraq and avenge 9/11, and was disabused of both quickly. He came home with PTSD at a point when roughly a quarter of those who served in Iraq did, and when the Marine Corps was still in denial that the condition existed. There was no help, he denied he needed it, he self-medicated, and he ended up in prison where there was no help either. The military had cut him loose without even the standing to call himself a veteran. Sitting in that cell, he decided that democracy was a fraud and the only family he could rely on was his race. He came out, found a community online that had been looking for exactly him — handsome, articulate, blonde, square-jawed, a decorated-looking veteran — founded Identity Evropa, and led the torches at Charlottesville. Some of the young men he recruited now work in government and law enforcement. 4. The looped footage was a form of indoctrination. Reitman watched the towers fall from her Brooklyn rooftop and had debris from the aircraft land in her street, so she is careful about how she puts this. But one of her characters, the Dallas lawyer Marlo Cadeddu, spent the following year walking into convenience stores and seeing the same footage playing again, and again, under the words never forget — and began to wonder what it was doing to people. Reitman thinks the answer is that it worked. It embedded the imagery and the mentality in the minds of Americans who had been nowhere near New York and would otherwise have stayed at some distance from it, connected everybody to a single moment, and made them angry. She regards that as one of the genuinely blameable things. 5. Her characters are not the ones who lost agency. We are. Pressed on whether the people ...

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  • #3063
    October 11 · 44 min

    Crowning Our Engineer Kings: Jensen Huang for President?

    Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch. America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on unregulated AI, Trump is acknowledging the power of the engineer. So would Jensen Huang make a better president than Donald Trump? In our weekly tech roundup, That Was The Week tech news publisher Keith Teare voted for king Donald. Whatever Trump’s flaws, Keith argues, he is at least a politician. Society isn’t logical, Keith said. It’s chaotic and messy, and so should be run by messy, chaotic people. A society run by king Jensen would, Keith warns, end up “drone-like”. But the Trump vs Huang choice might have already been made. Huang won’t appear on a ballot because he doesn’t need to. His five trillion dollar company is not only driving our economy but our politics too. Most importantly, Jensen Huang’s drone-like mindset of imagining society as an endless engineering problem is emerging as the AI policy of the current administration. Think of it as the ethic of the engineer. Only it claims there are no ethics, just engineering challenges and solutions. Earlier this week, Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz reminded us that Arendt linked Plato’s ideal of philosopher kings with the utopian promises of 20th century totalitarian leaders. I don’t think she would have been too keen on philosopher engineers either. ALSO THIS WEEK • Keith’s editorial, Men and Machines — subtitled Are You Afraid of Your Light Bulbs? — at That Was The Week — the line is Arvind Narayanan’s, from the Ezra Klein interview Keith builds the week around • Anthropic’s usage-policy change — worth reading before you form a view: it covers election interference, weapons and surveillance as well, and the cruelty clause is narrower than the headlines suggest • Jill Lepore at the Frankfurt Book Fair, urging publishers to declare their independence from Big Tech — the piece I sent Keith, to which he replied with a single word: dinosaur • Stephen Witt on this show last year, on the rise of Nvidia and its relentless chief executive: listen or watch • Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, whose AI and Political Freedom is the engineering take on democracy that came up here: listen or watch • Kailash Satyarthi yesterday, arguing the exact opposite of Keith — that compassion has to be designed into AI at the foundation stage: listen or watch FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. The argument isn’t whether to hand power to engineers. They have it. This is where Keith and I part company, and it took the hour to find the seam. He is strongly against ceding political power to engineers and does not think engineers and power belong in the same sentence. My position is that the sentence was written some time ago and nobody consulted us. Huang sits at the president’s right hand. The frontier labs decide what their products will and will not do. Whether or not engineers should be making moral decisions about technology, they are the ones making them, and the interesting debates — Huang against Amodei, say — are now intramural arguments among technologists with a few philosophers allowed in to watch. 2. Keith would rather have Trump as president than Jensen Huang. He said it flatly and I did not see it coming, because Keith is the techno-optimist in this partnership. His reasoning is that running a country means answering every question, not one question. If the only thing society had to decide was what to do about technology, he allowed, Huang might make a very good president. But take the question of how the wealth created by automation reaches ordinary people: that is not a Jensen Huang question. He may have an opinion on it, and an opinion is exactly what it would be — which is Keith’s definition of politics, and his reason for keeping engineers out of it. 3. Anthropic turned manners into a terms-of-service matter. The company updated its usage policy this week so that sustained abuse of Claude counts as a violation, alongside new clauses on election interference, weapons and surveillance. Anthropic says it bites only in extreme cases — repeated cruelty with no apparent purpose — and not on ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative material or red-teaming. Keith’s objection is categorical: swap Claude for Facebook, or for Microsoft Word, and hear how it sounds. It is software. My answer is that software is now the medium we live in, so the house rules of the medium are not a trivial matter, and a firm is entitled to set them for its own product. 4. Keith’s position on values in AI is that there should not be any. Not compassion, which Kailash Satyarthi was arguing for on this show only yesterday. Not the female or maternal sensibility Geoffrey Hinton has been urging. Nothing. There should be intelligence, full stop, and a human should be able to ask it anything and get intelligence back without the thing having an opinion. His argument is that a model is trained on effectively all of human output, so every view is already in there, and to tilt it towards any one stream is to switch off everyone who disagrees. He regards Anthropic training Claude to push back on a user as the essence of anti-democracy. I think a perfectly neutral algorithm is the most utopian idea in the conversation. 5. His definition of populism is that the people are paying attention. And that it terrifies politicians, because an electorate with opinions is an electorate out of control. He will not accept Trump as a populist — Trump is the symptom of populism — and he points out that Orbán, who was supposed to be dismantling Hungarian democracy, was voted out of office in April. His prediction follows from all of it: AI will produce more populism rather than less, because it hands the same intelligence to everybody, and educated citizens have more opinions, not fewer. ABOUT THE CO-HOST Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation and the publisher of That Was The Week, the weekly technology newsletter this conversation is built around. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded RealNames and the UK internet service provider Easynet, and was a found...

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