Keen On America

“Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event.” — Congressman Jared Huffman on January 6   We’ve featured many stark warnings about the threat of American Christian nationalism from journalists, activists, and religious scholars. Today, that warning comes from inside the government. In No Prophets , Californian congressman Jared Huffman warns that the threat of Chri...

“Anthropic will be a $3 trillion company, SpaceX $2 trillion, and OpenAI $1 to $1.5 trillion by Q2 of next year.” — Dave McClure   Yesterday, Keith Teare and I debated the circularity of the AI economy. Today, two of Silicon Valley’s most experienced investors, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee , not only straighten out this supposed “circularity” but also burst the pessimism bubble that envelops so ma...

“I don’t feel any shame at all recruiting an army of AI agents to help me accomplish my goals. But I think society is trying to make me feel shame.” — Keith Teare   Welcome to the summer of America’s luddite discontent. Not only are left and right calling for an AI ban, but tech loathing has even infiltrated Silicon Valley in the form of Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output. That, at...

“The machines today are like toddlers learning how to walk. They stumble. They’re not very good. They make mistakes.” — Anmol Madan   One in three American adults are already using AI for health information — with or without their doctors’ permission. The machines, in other words, are already seeing us. This will chill some Americans in our summer of luddite discontent. For others, however, like t...

“The Romans did that many, many times — until normal had changed so radically that there was nothing left of the republic to protect.” — Michelle Berenfeld on getting “back to normal”   Are we Rome (yet)? Michelle Berenfeld fears we are. Back in April of last year, the professor of classics at Pitzer College published “The Roman Way to Trash a Republic” in the Atlantic . And now Berenfeld has expa...

  “He’s not a trustworthy witness to his own story. Everything is ten times bigger and better than it really was — except when he was accused of crimes, in which case he can’t really remember anymore.” — Joby Warrick on Carlos the Jackal   Yesterday, WOLA’s Adam Isacson and John Walsh described how the US government has appropriated the term “narco-terrorism” to justify their Latin American killin...

“Each one of these is individually a crime scene, and the United States is the responsible actor.” — John Walsh   With America preoccupied (as always) with war in the Middle East, another kind of killing is taking place at its back door. Since early September of last year, the United States military has bombed 67 small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and assassinated 221 supposed “narco...

“Obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived. Death only figures in one sentence.” — Sam Roberts   This is, remarkably, episode 3,000 of Keen On America — three thousand conversations since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010. Fitting, then, that today’s guest has written nearly 1,500 obituaries for the New York Times . Sam Roberts is a reporter on the Times ’ obituaries...

“By operating in secrecy, they’re able to avoid or evade accountability — and, in many instances, engage in anticompetitive behavior or even fraud.” — Renée M. Jones on unicorns   Twelve years ago there were 39 unicorns — private companies worth a billion dollars or more. Today there are over 1,400, collectively valued above $7 trillion, with the twin beasts of Anthropic and OpenAI at the front of...

“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott   Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed.   Three days in August...

“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare   The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare . “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in ou...

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall   Yesterday , Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States , she explores 500 years of prof...

“Jared Kushner is one of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — and he has no skill set to speak of that I can see.” — Casey Michel   Four years ago, the muckraking journalist Casey Michel came on this show to discuss how the United States has built the greatest money-laundering scheme in history. That pre-Trump 2.0 America, he says, looks quaint. His new book, United S...

“We were still trying to change the world from the inside… and the empire struck back.” — Claire Stapleton on the Google Walkout   Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed on how to fight back against big tech which included a reading list from previous guests on the show like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis and Astra Taylor. Not included was Claire Stapleton ’s Don’t Be Evil: Bad Boss...

“Uncertainty is what tells you that science is reliable. It’s the people who are absolutely certain that you have to watch out for.” — Stuart Firestein   The physician-scientist Tony Fauci is having a rough week. His newly revealed diary has even disappointed traditional allies at The Atlantic and The New Yorker who see the hitherto liberal saint of the pandemic as both too intimate with power and...

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White’s motto for resistance   How to say no to fascism? Curtis White , the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance , the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the...

“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI   What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare , all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It’s the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our...

“Not everybody needs therapy. I’m a therapist and I’ll tell you first.” — Amy Morin   Is an epidemic of mental weakness sweeping America? Readers of the Wall Street Journal certainly might think so, given a couple of recent articles. In one, it reports on burnt-out singles who are using spreadsheets to evaluate their dates. In the other, young adults are taking their phones to social events and le...

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon   Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today’s $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today’s digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. Thes...

Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month’s Harper’s cover story, “Radical Reformat...

“The statesman is an educator who leads through language — who gives a people the language they need to think about themselves.” — Steven B. Smith on what makes a statesman   Was Odysseus a statesman? The Yale political philosopher Steven B. Smith — who, by the way, can’t beg, steal or borrow a ticket to Christopher Nolan’s cinematic epic — offers a cautious yes. While Odysseus wasn’t exactly a fo...

“It’s too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology   Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city’s more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission was fr...

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America   How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It , a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial . In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French versio...

“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week   Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence . No wonder, as Keith’s e...

What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It’s relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone   Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady — and with this death went one of the key stages on which...