Keen On America

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum   In April , the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth , his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book co...

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones   Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything , makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brow...

“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev   How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev , co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism , a phrasebook which provides a hu...

“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt   In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes eve...

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran   Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran , who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Bi...

“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle   Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came...

“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station , David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking Am...

“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don’t get it.” — Barry Werth   Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher’s eureka moment, how...

Amidst all the talk of an AI bubble, bonds are back in the news. The world’s two leading business newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times , both feature stories this weekend warning about bond ructions and surging yields . While these warnings might only interfere with the sleep of bond geeks, they are a good reminder of the centrality of the bond market to our prosperity.   Fo...

Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks.   It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives...

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch   As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner , who argued in The New York Times that Trump...

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz   The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years a...

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher   Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence th...

“Democracies don’t die silently, sleepwalking. Democracies die by going through periods of pretty serious political violence.” — Robert Pape   Forget all the long-term civil war scenarios of everyone from Kurt Andersen to Stephen Marche . Today’s guest Robert Pape has spent the last thirty years at the University of Chicago studying political violence, and his warning is about the next six weeks r...

“I think patrimonialism is exactly the right phrase to describe the way in which the current administration is governing.” — Peter Hall   Neoliberalism is dead. So what comes next? Peter Hall , a Harvard political economist for the last four decades, says the capitalist locomotive left the neoliberal station years ago. His new book, Governing Growth , names the next stop: the “knowledge economy,”...

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein   Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the his...

Last week we were panicking about a supposedly imminent AI apocalypse. Seven days later, Keith Teare argues, government oversight is about as far away as it could possibly be. That’s because Musk, Altman and Amodei agreed to police themselves and test each other’s models. The doomers, says the publisher of That Was The Week , have lost not just this week’s battle but probably the whole war.   So w...

My hometown of San Francisco has the unholy problem of a mansion shortage and mass homelessness. AI money is driving house prices to record highs, our mayor has declared a rent emergency, while in New York City housing affordability has become so acute as to become a rare bipartisan concern. This unreality of the real-estate market has heated up both local and national politics. But as Joshua Spec...

“Today’s fascists don’t look at all like those from the past. What is similar is how they act. You’ll recognize the fascist by what they do.” — Rosan Smits   Fascism is a reality in both America and Europe. At least according to Rosan Smits , the Dutch political scientist whose This Is Fascism: A Wake-Up Call to Resist is already a bestseller in Europe. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in...

“Since Trump’s second election we’ve been in a wave of cowardice, where people have decided — partly by observing what others like them are doing — that there’s no viability to standing up on principle.” — Jacob Weisberg   Michelle Goldberg devoted her Monday New York Times column to two new books shaming the elites who caved to Trump. Both of them have appeared on the show this week: Susan Neiman...

“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen   After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Doug...

“Add up all of their wealth — it’s more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined.” — Eric Zwick   Yesterday, the democratic socialist Susan Neiman blamed free market economics for all the evils of our age. But the market gives and the market takes. And in America it has minted three million millionaires whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. This human backbone of...

“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman   Susan Neiman is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought , an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans , her 2019...

Something unprecedented happened yesterday. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei — rivals who rarely agree on anything — all called for an AI slowdown. It came after more and more doomsday warnings from experts which seem to have finally woken Congress up to AI’s potentially existential threat. Axios even claimed that Speaker Mike Johnson is considering canceling the House recess to force membe...

“One believes in democracy and the rule of law, and right now, the other doesn’t.” — Adam Jentleson   Yesterday, William Hitchcock explained FDR’s ability to build and maintain supermajorities. Today, Adam Jentleson — Harry Reid’s former deputy chief of staff and chief of staff to John Fetterman — talks about how the Democrats can build lasting power in the 21st century. The strategy is laid out i...