“I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie Haigney

On April Fools’ Day, The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency.” But it wasn’t a joke. Sophie Haigney — former web editor of The Paris Review, currently working on a debut essay collection entitled Future Relics — warns that “agency” has become the defining buzzword of Silicon Valley bro culture. From Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, Haigney observes, our new tech overlords have made becoming “high agency” their top priority in self-realization. Haigney argues that these entrepreneurs touting high agency most insistently are the very same people building the tools most likely to rob everyone else of theirs. Like her New York Times jeremiad, it’s no joke. Altman and Zuckerberg’s agentic technologies are often exploitative and addictive. They will make the worst people worse. Ha ha. It will be April Fools’ Day every day.

Five Takeaways

•       The 401(k) Is Low Agency: Sam Altman’s first answer to “what skills to develop in the age of AI”: become high agency. The term has migrated from philosophy and debates about free will into Silicon Valley self-help, LinkedIn posts, and entrepreneurship podcasts. In its new form it has a gambling element the old bootstrap individualism lacked. Someone in San Francisco told Haigney that having a 401(k) is the lowest-agency thing you can do with your money. Put it all on red. The rewards for big risk-taking are so much larger now that incrementalism — get a job, save up, buy a house — looks like passivity. That’s a new development, and a dangerous one.

•       The People Promoting Agency Are Robbing You of Yours: Haigney’s sharpest observation: the people promoting high agency most loudly are building the tools most likely to strip it from everyone else. Sam Altman says become high agency. His product — in Haigney’s view — will function like social media: not liberating but addictive, another rabbit hole that makes people more stuck. The gambling epidemic is the same logic. Sports betting offers the seductive illusion that your specific knowledge can crack the system. But the system is designed so the average person can’t win. High agency, in practice, tends to concentrate at the top.

•       Stuckness and the Lottery Mindset: We live in a moment of extreme stuckness — people who feel two steps away from winning the lottery and yet completely unable to move. This odd combination — paralysis plus the fantasy of a big break — is what the high-agency ideology exploits. Haigney connects it to the gambling epidemic, to the male podcasters with beards, to the young men who feel the system is rigged against them and are being told: the solution is to become the kind of person who cuts in line. What nobody says is that the cutting-in-line ethos, scaled up, is what produced the system they feel rigged by in the first place.

•       Hitler Was High Agency: The most unsettling move in the piece. Agency without values is just power. FDR was high agency: he packed the court, overrode term limits, used wartime powers to push through the New Deal. Dictators, Haigney notes, are quite high agency. The tech adoption of the term strips it of any moral content — agency is promoted for its own sake, disconnected from any question of what it’s being used for. That, she argues, is what makes it genuinely frightening at scale. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is the American ancestor. Thoreau, its famous practitioner, got his mum to do his laundry.

•       High Agency Could Mean Repair: Haigney’s counter-proposal: couldn’t we be high agency and organize to build a better railway? Wouldn’t it be high agency to fix the Department of Education rather than abolishing it? The NHS, railways, public education — systems people are nostalgic for — required enormous collective agency to build. The tech definition of agency is individualistic and destructive. But there’s another definition: the capacity to act together, to create rather than just disrupt. That version doesn’t get much airtime on the podcasts. It should.

About the Guest

Sophie Haigney is a critic and journalist who writes about visual art, books, and technology for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and others. She is a former web editor of The Paris Review and is working on her debut essay collection, Future Relics, for Liveright.

References:

•       “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency,” The New York Times, April 1, 2026. By Sophie Haigney.

•       Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841) — the American philosophical ancestor of today’s high-agency ideology.

•       Episode 2858: Scott Galloway on the male crisis — agency, stuckness, and young men.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - “All the worst people seem to want to be high agency” — the April 1 op-ed
• (02:51) - The Silicon Valley definition: risk, disruption, cutting in line
• (04:52) - Emerson, self-reliance, and the new American individualism
• (06:44) - Is high agency essential to survive the 2020s?
• (08:41) - Thoreau’s laundry: the gendered dimension of agency
• (11:04) - Male podcasters, the crisis of young men, and the seduction of high agency
• (12:20) - Stuckness, gambling, and the lottery mindset
• (16:13) - TikTok, the Grateful Dead, and the age of addiction
• (17:16) - The people promoting agency are building tools to take it from you
• (18:29) - AI: the biggest addiction on the horizon
• (19:56) - Agency as the new political axis: left, right, and disruption
• (21:29) - Is skepticism of agency just nostalgia for the twentieth century?
• (24:16) - California’s failed railways, China’s success, and democracy’s agency problem
• (25:16) - Hitler was high agen...

“Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.” — Franklin Foer

How do Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump explain the world? According to Franklin Foer — senior writer at The Atlantic and author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization — they’re both (or were, in the case of Bin Laden), like Foer himself, rootless Arsenal fans. That’s the irony of our simultaneously tribal and globalized world. The more rootless we become, the sharper our imagined identities. Thus the DC-based Foer, who showed up for this interview flaunting his Gooner gear, never misses an Arsenal game on tv, even though he grew up almost four thousand miles west of Highbury.

Foer’s 2004 classic has been reissued with a new preface in honor of the World Cup. As he notes, this upcoming MAGA spectacle will only underline the tribal-global nature of the world. On the one hand, Trump wants to emulate Mussolini (1934) and Putin (2018) in transforming the sporting event into a celebration of localism. On the other hand, the expansion of the tournament into 48 teams mirrors the increasingly international reality of today’s world.

And then there’s the distant but delicious possibility of an Iran-USA final. In 2022 in Qatar, the Iranian players refused to sing the national anthem in the opening game to protest the killing of a young woman who wasn’t wearing a headscarf. Foer argues that the national team represents an idea of Iran quite foreign from that of the theocracy. While the anti-MAGA Foer wouldn’t support Iran against the USA, he does argue that one of the great failures of the American left has been its inability to speak the language of patriotism. So Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom should wave the flag this summer. Whose flag he doesn’t say. Probably the Arsenal if the global Foer had his tribal North London way.

Five Takeaways

•       Globalization Is a Form of Tribalism: Thomas Friedman said countries with McDonald’s don’t go to war with each other. Foer’s book said the opposite: globalization doesn’t dissolve tribal identity, it sharpens it. Barcelona can have Dutch DNA from Cruyff and a Qatari airline on the jersey — it’s still a symbol of Catalan nationalism. The cosmopolitan elites who predicted the melting of national borders were themselves a tribe that mistook its tribal identity for universal truth. Andrew’s formulation: globalization is a form of tribalism. Foer, cautiously, agrees.

•       Trump’s Bread and Circuses: Trump has identified three spectacles as the tent poles of his presidency: the 250th anniversary celebration of the United States, the Olympics, and the World Cup — which he calls the biggest spectacle of his term. Every strongman in history has understood the distracting quality of a spectacle. Putin sat in Moscow in 2018, ominously presiding. Mussolini had 1934. Trump won’t be a passive participant. The expanded tournament was, Foer says, a greedy error — the early rounds will be poor — and the whole thing will unfold under the shadow of a president who wants to cosplay as president of the planet.

•       The Financialization of Fandom: When Foer wrote the book in 2002, the transfer market was a big deal but not the phenomenon it is now. Fans have been forced to become conversant in the balance sheets of their clubs, getting upset when the club overpays. There’s something sad about that — your relationship to a team has been financialized. Meanwhile, the Premier League jacks up ticket prices every year, people complain, and the stadiums are still full. The new power centres in the game are Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds using soccer as reputation laundering and soft power, and American private equity with its arrogant belief that it can do better than whoever was there before.

•       The Iranian Team and the True Carriers of Civilization: In the last World Cup, Iranian players refused to sing the national anthem as protest against a government that had just killed a young woman for not wearing a headscarf. They were pressured to sing in the next game. The diaspora was divided. Foer’s argument: the Iranian national team represents an idea of Iran entirely divorced from the theocracy — a spirit of nationhood, not religion. When Trump talked about destroying Iranian civilization, he was discouraging the people who consider themselves its true carriers and the regime’s real opponents. Foer thinks it would be genuinely good if Iran could come and play in this World Cup.

•       The Left’s Patriotism Failure: Foer’s parting argument: one of the great failures of the left in its quest for cosmopolitan ideals has been its inability to speak the language of patriotism. Even if the impulses behind progressive ideas could be described as patriotic, that’s been one of the things limiting their political appeal. Should Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom wave the flag this summer at the World Cup? Foer says yes. Andrew, a Spurs fan born in North London who has lived in the United States for decades, suggests he would be “amused” if Iran beat America in the final. They do not reach agreement.

About the Guest

Franklin Foer is a senior writer at The Atlantic and the author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (reissued 2026 with a new preface), The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. He lives in Washington, DC.

References:

•       How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer (reissued 2026 with new preface).

•       “The Quintessential Trumpian Sport,” The Atlantic, April 2026. By Franklin Foer.

•       Episode 2858: World Cup Fever — Simon Kuper, who has attended nine consecutive World Cups, on the 2026 tournament.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

“You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don’t touch the police budget.” — Stuart Schrader

Fifty years ago, America’s local police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians. Not anymore. Stuart Schrader has spent years in the archives tracing how it happened. In Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, Schrader begins the story in Sixties Detroit, where a young, progressive Democratic mayor found his career derailed by a police union fighting for recognition. It was the opening move of a decades-long campaign in which rank-and-file officers took advantage of the tools of American democracy — unions, lobbying, litigation, public relations — to lift policing above the law.

Schrader’s most counterintuitive finding is that the greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats like Joe Biden. With Trump 2.0, the story gets even stranger. ICE — anonymous, paramilitary, seemingly answerable to no one — has paradoxically made local police look credible by comparison. Some police unions have tried to exploit the contrast at contract renewal time. Others have quietly welcomed the federal incursions as a way to challenge progressive city councils in Los Angeles, Chicago, and DC. It’s almost as if today’s democratically elected politicians serve at the pleasure of the local police.

Five Takeaways

•       The Detroit Opening Move: The book begins in 1960s Detroit, where a young, charismatic, progressive Democratic mayor found his political career effectively destroyed by a police union fighting for recognition. That wasn’t an accident. Police were simultaneously being called on to put down urban rebellions and gaining new workplace power through public sector unionization laws. They married those two things together: law and order rhetoric plus well-compensated, long-leashed officers. The Supreme Court’s rights revolution — criminal defendants’ rights, civil rights — felt to police like an existential threat. Blue Power was their answer.

•       Biden and the Bipartisan Consensus: Schrader’s most counterintuitive finding: the greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats. Joe Biden, as a senator, was one of the most important figures in unifying police organizations — rural versus urban, command rank versus rank and file — and ensuring legislation met their demands. The law-and-order consensus wasn’t just Republican. It was built by Democrats who were terrified of the crime hysteria, and police who were expert at stoking it. Even once crime began its dramatic decline in the 1990s, police kept using the fear. We stopped the crime wave. Now pay up.

•       Crime Hysteria as a Political Weapon: Police learned early that crime statistics were a cudgel. Sign a good contract or crime will go up. And the tactic worked — not because the connection between police compensation and crime rates is real (Schrader says it isn’t), but because the fear was real. Social scientists still can’t fully explain why crime rose dramatically through the 1960s-80s and then declined just as dramatically from the mid-1990s. Police can’t explain it either. But no other public sector union operates this way. Sanitation workers don’t demand raises because they plowed the streets well in a heavy winter. Teachers don’t point to test scores. Police do.

•       ICE, Blue Power, and the Trump Paradox: ICE — anonymous, paramilitary, answerable to no one, reluctant even to wear identifying insignia — has paradoxically made local police look credible by contrast. Some unions have tried to exploit this at contract renewal time: we’re not ICE, so pay us accordingly. Others have quietly welcomed the federal incursions as a way to override progressive city councils in Chicago, LA, DC, and elsewhere. The Border Patrol union was one of the first to endorse Trump in 2016 and has been rewarded handsomely. Blue Power is nothing if not adaptable.

•       Why Defunding Failed — and What Actually Matters: Blue Power, Schrader argues, is the primary reason defunding didn’t happen. Police used the same political tactics the book describes to thwart those demands from movements — the same lobbying, litigation, public relations, and contract leverage they’ve been deploying since the 1960s. The real question isn’t defund or not defund. It’s how cities allocate their resources. Over and over again in his research, Schrader found police saying explicitly: cut parks and rec, cut libraries, cut pothole repair — but don’t touch our budget. That argument, made in fiscal crisis after fiscal crisis, has never really stopped.

About the Guest

Stuart Schrader is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is the author of Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Basic Books, 2026) and Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019).

References:

•       Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves by Stuart Schrader (Basic Books, 2026).

•       “Authoritarianism from Below,” New York Review of Books, 2026. By Stuart Schrader.

•       Episode 2021 [March 2021]: Rosa Brooks on Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City — the sympathetic counterpoint to Schrader’s critique.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue, and the sympathetic take on policing
• (03:44) - Authoritarianism from below: how police seized political power
• (05:09) - Conscious strategy or structural drift? The origins of Blue Power
• (08:37) - What drives Blue Power: ideology, bureaucracy, or money?
• (09:19...

“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann

Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — believes that the fate of the 21st century may hinge on Taiwan. And he warns that if America can’t handle Iran, it’s certainly not ready for Beijing.

Freymann argues that China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan. Xi Jinping has watched Putin discover — with horror — what happens when you send unprepared forces into a country that fights back. China’s lesson from Ukraine is a strategy of quarantine rather than invasion. The United States will then face a choice between accepting Chinese checkmate or escalating a crisis with no domestic or international support. Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. If those chip factories shut, there will be an instantaneous global financial crisis.

Forget today’s Iranian theater. Taiwan will be the real existential show.

Five Takeaways

•       The Hormuz Alarm Bell: Iran has no navy, no air force, and supposedly no ballistic missile arsenal anymore — and yet it took 20% of global oil supply offline. The Trump administration went in thinking overwhelming military superiority would translate to political victory. It hasn’t. Strategy, Freymann says, is the art of connecting ends to means. If you don’t know your ends, you’ll flail. China is watching every mistake: no plan for the economic shock, no domestic legitimacy for the war, excess pain falling on oil-importing US allies like Japan, South Korea, and Europe. Beijing’s conclusion: we don’t have to pick a military fight with the United States. Why would we?

•       The Semiconductor Chokehold: Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. The CHIPS Act has tried to change this. It hasn’t. The Arizona facility is two generations behind Taiwan, commercially uncompetitive, and unable to scale. Taiwan is five years ahead now and will be five years ahead in five years. If the Taiwan fabs go offline, there is an instantaneous global financial crisis: the seven companies that account for roughly 40% of the S&P 500 are all essentially the AI trade. The hyperscalers are spending $600 billion in data centers this year — the only thing keeping the US economy out of recession. This is what’s at stake, before you even get to the military question.

•       The Quarantine: Winning Without Fighting: Xi Jinping’s plan A is not invasion. It’s the quarantine: seize control of who and what comes and goes to Taiwan by declaring that anyone flying to Taipei must first clear customs in Shanghai. Impound a United Airlines flight. Let the ambiguity do the work. If China can do that and get away with it, Taiwan can’t rebuild its military, the US can’t send more weapons, and Beijing controls the chips. It’s checkmate — without a shot fired. The United States then has to accept it, or escalate in a way that has no domestic legitimacy and drives wedges between Washington and its allies. China has figured out how to extort the West with prolonged economic pain. The alarm bells keep ringing. America keeps snoozing.

•       What a Taiwan War Would Actually Look Like: It would be a war at sea — fundamentally unlike anything America has fought or prepared for in eighty years. China would need to simultaneously control the skies, the undersea, and the surface on all sides of the Taiwan Strait, then send tens of thousands of men 80 miles across in amphibious vessels to storm beaches in a Normandy-style assault. The first engagements would be decided in minutes to hours by long-range precision munitions. America’s operational capabilities are exceptional: the cyber assassinations, the special forces raid, the continuous bomber sorties from the continental United States. But China has home-field advantage. And it has been building systematically for this scenario for years. We could probably win if we fought today. We need to make investments for tomorrow.

•       The Four-Pillar Strategy: Freymann’s integrated answer: diplomacy, military deterrence, economic resilience, and allied coordination — all working together, not in separate silos. On diplomacy: maintain the principled position that Taiwan’s status must be resolved peacefully and democratically. On military: show China it can’t win if it escalates to war, while keeping conventional forces credible. On economics: build enough allied resilience that authoritarian powers can’t extort the West by threatening prolonged economic pain. On allies: coordinate with Japan, South Korea, the Europeans on a shared plan for what happens if things collapse. This is doable. It’s been done for fifty years. We just need the resolve to keep doing it.

About the Guest

Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. He is the author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford University Press, 2026), The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices (Hoover, 2025), and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard, 2021).

References:

•       Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann (Oxford University Press, 2026).

•       “The Strait of Hormuz as a Template for Taiwan,” Financial Times, April 2026. By Eyck Freymann.

•       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — on AI, disinformation, and American strategic confusion.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama

The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-born Jacob Mchangama watched that happen in a country where free speech had been considered as natural as breathing, and has since dedicated his professional life to defending it. Thus The Future of Free Speech, Mchangama’s new book coauthored with Jeff Kosseff.

It’s also the reasoning behind his Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt, where Mchangama runs the only serious academic program dedicated to the proposition that democracy’s most essential freedom is in global retreat. The Varieties of Democracy dataset agrees. The number of countries where free speech is declining has increased dramatically; those where it’s strengthening are few. In 2000, Bill Clinton laughed at the idea that China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” Over the last quarter century, China has perfected that art.

The decline doesn’t come from a single ideological camp, which is Mchangama’s most politically inconvenient point. He suggests that the left has convinced itself that hate speech regulation, age verification for social media, and disinformation controls are acts of democratic hygiene. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is overtly shutting down free speech at a scale unmatched in recent American history. And then there’s the paradoxical possibility that anti-social-media liberals like Jonathan Haidt, in their fervor to take freedom of online expression from kids, are also contributing to today’s great recession in free speech. Left, right, and center. America, China, Denmark. Nobody, it seems, wants to allow us to say anything anymore.

Five Takeaways

•       The Editor Who Lived Under Protection: The editor of Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the 2005 Mohammed cartoons spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He had asked cartoonists to draw. They came after him with AK-47s. Ten years later came Charlie Hebdo — the French satirical magazine that had republished the cartoons as an act of solidarity, and saw twelve people murdered when two jihadists entered its offices. For Mchangama, growing up in Denmark where free speech felt as natural as breathing, this was the event that changed everything. The last place he expected an existential challenge to free speech was religion.

•       Democracy’s Varieties Are Shrinking: The Varieties of Democracy project — probably the most sophisticated dataset of free speech indicators — shows the trend line is clear: the number of countries where free speech has declined has increased dramatically, while those where it is being strengthened are few. Bill Clinton laughed in 2000 at the idea China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” China has since perfected the art. The internet’s original techno-optimistic promise — that censorship would be consigned to the ash heap of history — has been turned on its head. The recession of free speech has gone hand in hand with a wider democracy recession.

•       Four Hateful Men and the Minority Principle: The most important US Supreme Court decisions protecting free speech deal with extremely hateful people — viciously antisemitic speakers, members of the KKK. And very often, Black and Jewish civil rights organizations defended them on principle, because they knew: if you are a vulnerable and persecuted minority, you depend more than a majority on the ability to challenge power. You depend on a principled protection of free speech. That history has largely been forgotten. Free speech, Mchangama argues, can be under attack from the left, from the right, even from centrists. The Trump administration is restricting it. The woke left tried to. The answer is principled, consistent defence — regardless of who’s speaking.

•       Elite Panic Is the Historical Constant: Every time the public sphere is expanded through new communications technology, the traditional gatekeepers fret about the consequences of allowing the unwashed mob direct and unmediated access to information. The World Economic Forum declared disinformation the largest short-term threat to humanity ahead of the 2024 super-election year, when around two billion people were eligible to vote. Researchers studying those elections could not identify AI-generated disinformation as having shifted a single outcome. The AI disinformation apocalypse never materialized. Jonathan Haidt — who has done important earlier work on free speech and academic freedom — may be exhibiting motivated reasoning in his crusade for age verification. Elite panic looks the same from every century.

•       Creative AI vs. Intrusive AI: Mchangama distinguishes two faces of AI. Creative AI gives superpowers on demand — a PhD-level tutor for reading Homer, research agents that operate at a depth and scope previously unimaginable. Intrusive AI enables the most powerful surveillance and censorship regimes the world has ever seen. “If Hitler or Stalin had the powers that the Chinese Communist Party has now — that is a frightening thought in and of itself.” Preemptive safetyism is the wrong response: AI is a general-purpose technology. Filter it in the name of preventing disinformation and you hand governments and companies a filter over the entire ecosystem of ideas and information. The same logic as free speech. Applied to the most powerful communications technology ever built.

About the Guest

Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media and the coauthor, with Jeff Kosseff, of The Future of Free Speech.

References:

•       The Future of Free Speech by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).

•       “The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth,” Wall Street Journal, March 2026. By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff.

•       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mchangama’s counter-argument on disinformation panic.

•       Upcoming: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion argument to Mchangama on what dissent actually requires.

 <...

“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare

Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” No, of course, he can’t be trusted. Not according to the New Yorker. Especially with something as precious as, gasp, our future.

Not everyone, however, is sold on this media cult of personality. In his That Was The Week editorial, Keith Teare tells the media to take their hands off Sam. I don’t disagree. Although I’m a bit skeptical of Keith’s attempt to demonize what he defines as a “devious” Dario Amodei. Whether it’s Altman, Amodei or Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis, all these guys are prisoners of their company’s structures and cultures. They are also victims of today’s anti-tech hysteria. It’s one thing to blow up Silicon Valley’s cartoonish cult of personality, it’s quite another to hurl bombs at these people’s homes. Enough with all the violence – verbal or otherwise. It never ends well.

Five Takeaways

•       A Molotov Cocktail at Slippery Sam’s House: On Friday night, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion, according to The New York Times. Andrew lives nearby and didn’t hear it. The week’s zeitgeist had already turned: a 15,000-word New Yorker hit piece by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, wall-to-wall coverage, Sam moving into Musk-like media-frenzy territory. Keith’s editorial: Hands Off Sam Altman. The personality-driven circus has caught fire. Quite literally.

•       Anthropic’s Mythic Model Finds Decade-Old Vulnerabilities: The actual AI news this week, drowned out by the personality circus. Anthropic’s new “Mythic” model autonomously discovered security holes in software that had eluded human experts for years. Dario refused to release it openly until the patches were complete. Treasury Secretary Bessent commented on the implications for banks and government. The signal: AI is becoming systematically better than the best humans at specialist domains. Generalists can probably relax.

•       Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario vs Honest Hassabis: Keith’s contrarian take: Altman is honest because he’s openly dishonest. Amodei is the devious one — a politically liberal narrative wrapped around a commercial juggernaut. Andrew’s third way is yesterday’s Mallaby interview: Demis Hassabis, the Spinozan one-faced scientist who would rather be at Princeton. But even Demis must have authorised the firing of Mustafa Suleiman. Everyone has a game plan, said Mike Tyson, until they get punched in the face.

•       Post of the Week: Keith Replaces WordPress in Ten Minutes: Keith’s tweet: he’s run two curation sites — seriouslyphotography.com and seriouslybc.com — on WordPress for over a decade. Last Friday afternoon, he asked Anthropic’s tools to rewrite them. Ten minutes later, both sites were rebuilt from scratch, fully responsive, WordPress gone. Cost in the old world: tens of thousands of dollars and several months. The Matt Mullenweg vs Matthew Prince debate is settled by the actual technology while the principals are still arguing.

•       The End of Ownership? Keith Goes Marxist: Pure capitalism, Keith argues, will produce so much abundance that scarcity ends and self-interested competition with it. “In the future there will be no ownership, or everything will be commonly owned.” Andrew calls it Marx with Tesla characteristics. Eric Ries’s forthcoming Incorruptible argues that Patagonia and Mondragon point a different way — structural ethics rather than abundance utopianism. Two visions of the post-AI economy. Both probably wrong. We’ll find out.

About the Guest

Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. A former Washington Post columnist and Economist contributing editor, he is the author of More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew (winner of the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year), The Power Law, and now The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.

References:

•       The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby.

•       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mallaby’s quiet counter-argument.

•       Episode 2860: We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us — Keith Teare on agency in our agentic age. Hassabis thinks he can still steer.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - A Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights house
• (02:41) - The New Yorker hit piece: Ronan Farrow, Andrew Marantz, 15,000 words
• (05:36) - Slippery Sam and the zeitgeist
• (07:39) - Brian Merchant: it’s open season for refusing AI
• (08:09) - Anthropic’s Mythic model finds decade-old vulnerabilities
• (10:46) - Why even release it? Dario’s narcissism
• (12:12) - Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario
• (14:11) - Hassabis as the third way
• (18:29) - The Mustafa Suleiman question
• (19:17) - Mike Tyson, Kant, Spinoza, and Hobbes
• (22:09) - Brian Merchant and the new Luddism
• (23:34) - Anthropic makes a new generation redundant every week
• (23:34) - Post of the week: Keith rebuilds his sites in 10 minutes
• (26:39) - Eric Ries on incorruptible companies
• (30:12) - Patagonia, Berkeley Bowl, Mondragon
• (35:43) - The end of ownership? Keith goes Marxist

“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD

Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD, returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American healthcare, Dr Pearl says, is “ultra stable.” That might sound good. But it’s actually very very bad.

If you biopsied American healthcare in 2010 and again in 2026, Pearl says, no clinician could tell the slides apart. Both were and are overpriced. Both underperforming. Hospitals still represent between 30-35% of expenses. Costs continue to rise at between 7-9% a year. There remain four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths annually. Burnout is stuck at 50%. The numbers haven’t moved in fifteen years.

Meanwhile, a stealth revolution is already underway. 40% of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. 70-80% of physicians use it weekly. While the patients and doctors have moved, the system hasn’t. It remains ultra-stable. It’s a Kodak moment — healthcare’s business model, Pearl suggests, is selling sickness. So, for example, the new new medical thing is GLP-1 drugs that cost $5 to manufacture and sell for $400.

So will the system collapse? No, Pearl insists. It has too much strength for that kind of drama. Instead, it will quietly ration us to death — more chronic disease, earlier deaths, more people making a major sacrifice to pay their healthcare bills. Ultra-stability, then, is what is killing the American healthcare system. It will, quite literally, ration us to death.

Five Takeaways

•       Ultra Stable: Pearl’s diagnosis of American healthcare in one phrase. Hospitals stay at thirty to thirty-five per cent of total expenses. Costs rise at seven to nine per cent annually. Life expectancy hasn’t budged. Four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths a year. Burnout at fifty per cent. Biopsy 2010 and 2026 — no one could tell the slides apart. Both overpriced. Both underperforming.

•       The Stealth Revolution Has Already Happened: Forty per cent of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. Seventy to eighty per cent of physicians use it weekly. The patients and doctors have moved. The system hasn’t. It’s a Kodak moment — they had the first filmless camera and let it die because their business model was selling film. Healthcare’s business model is selling sickness.

•       Quietly Rationed to Death: There will be no dramatic collapse. The system has too much strength for that. Instead: rationing, more chronic disease, earlier deaths. Like airlines moving everyone into first class while the rest drive. Twenty-five per cent of Americans already made a major sacrifice to pay healthcare bills last year. When it hits fifty per cent, maybe the polling places will notice. Pearl is doubtful.

•       GLP-1s Cost $5 to Make and $400 to Buy: Yale’s analysis: the manufacturing cost of a GLP-1 drug is $5 a month. They sell at a discounted price of $400. That’s eighty times markup. Pearl’s math: to make GLP-1s cost-neutral against the medical savings, the price has to be under $200. Trump Rx won’t help most people because you can’t use insurance there and $400 cash is still impossible on $60,000 a year.

•       Vibe Coding Is the Prescription: One year old. Lets clinicians build software in plain English without code. Pearl’s example: a heart failure patient at home, weighed daily on a Bluetooth scale, with an electronic stethoscope, ankle video, blood oxygen, exercise tolerance — all in an app a doctor could build in a weekend. Three days of fluid retention caught before the ICU admission. Cost: twenty dollars a month. The fix has arrived. The system isn’t using it.

About the Guest

Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History and American Studies at Yale. She is the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History. She is currently at work on a biography of Ronald Reagan.

References:

•       This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History by Beverly Gage.

•       G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage — the Pulitzer-winning biography.

•       Episode 2859: Stop, Don’t Do That — Peter Edelman on Bobby Kennedy and the heart of America. The companion conversation.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - Introduction: AI and the American healthcare sector
• (01:47) - ChatGPT MD: chronic disease and the trillion-dollar opportunity
• (04:50) - The stealth revolution: 40% of patients, 80% of doctors
• (06:53) - Ultra stability: the 2010-vs-2026 biopsy
• (09:50) - Three years of generative AI and counting
• (11:13) - Will the system collapse? No — it will quietly ration
• (13:33) - The drip-drip of preventable deaths
• (16:08) - GLP-1 drugs: $5 to make, $400 to buy
• (18:23) - Vibe coding enters the conversation
• (21:22) - Will AI replace clinicians?
• (28:08) - Trump Rx and why it won’t help most people
• (30:41) - RFK Jr., vaccines, and the war on science
• (33:23) - The midterms as the political reckoning
• (35:29) - The three-step fix: capitation, transition, capital
• (39:48) - Vibe coding and the heart failure example

“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage

When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America to prepare for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The result of these thirteen separate road trips is This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History. Gage’s Subaru broke down constantly. So, from time to time, did her health. But the American history she uncovered is anything but broken down.

Historians, Gage argues, don’t think enough about geography. Visiting the homes of the first four US Presidents from Virginia, she saw how closely America’s slaveholding elite actually lived. Driving through the small towns on the Erie Canal, she found the corridor where abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and reform Christianity were all born. At Disneyland, the final chapter in her road trip, she went to the Abraham Lincoln stage show and imagined Main Street USA as Walt Disney’s parable about US history. The gap between the imagined America and the real one (yes, there is a real one, she insists) is where true history lives.

Gage’s thesis is that there is a third road — too much of a backstreet these days — between American pride and shame in its history. Her book maps that path. You can face up to your history, she argues, and still love your country. In a moment when inane triumphalism and apocalyptic despair dominate America’s sense of itself, Gage’s quiet historical reflection feels like the rarest of national commodities. Ben Franklin wondered in 1787 if the sun was rising or setting on America. Two hundred and fifty years later, Beverly Gage got in her Subaru and went on the road to find out.

Five Takeaways

•       Out of the Library and Into the Subaru: Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for her eight-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Her next book is on Ronald Reagan. Between the two, she needed a break. So she got in her unreliable Subaru and drove across America in thirteen trips, covering six months on the road, to prepare for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Subaru broke down constantly. The history she found was worth it.

•       Historians Don’t Think Enough About Geography: Visiting the homes of the first four presidents from Virginia, Gage saw how closely the slaveholding elite actually lived — neighbours, not just names in a textbook. Driving the Erie Canal in upstate New York, she found the corridor where abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and reform Christianity were all born in a handful of small towns. Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were neighbours. History on the ground is different from history in books.

•       Disneyland Is a Parable About American History: When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, Main Street USA reached back to his own childhood in the age of William McKinley. Frontierland told the heroic story of the American past. Tomorrowland celebrated Cold War technological optimism. Most visitors don’t think about this. Gage does. She went to the Abraham Lincoln stage show. The gap between the imagined America and the real one is where the history lives.

•       The Third Road: Between Pride and Shame: Gage encountered Americans who said: celebrate the country, I want nothing to do with that. She encountered others who said: only say the good stuff. She wanted to live in the tension between them. You can face your history and still love your country. That’s the thesis of the book, and the argument for how to approach 250 years of American history in a moment when both triumphalism and despair are on offer.

•       Upstate New York Was Where Americans Reimagined Themselves: Gage’s favourite chapter. In the 1840s and 1850s along the Erie Canal, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were actually neighbours. They were writing their own constitutions and rethinking the Declaration of Independence. Douglass gave his famous “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” speech in Rochester. They were in it together. If you want to find the third road, this is where to start.

About the Guest

Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History and American Studies at Yale. She is the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History. She is currently at work on a biography of Ronald Reagan.

References:

•       This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History by Beverly Gage.

•       G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage — the Pulitzer-winning biography.

•       Episode 2859: Stop, Don’t Do That — Peter Edelman on Bobby Kennedy and the heart of America. The companion conversation.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - Introduction: out of the library, into the Subaru
• (01:57) - Why a road trip? The 250th anniversary approaches
• (04:18) - Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, displaced
• (05:32) - Goldberger becomes Gage: a father’s anglicised name
• (07:46) - This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie as frame
• (08:18) - Historians don’t think enough about geography
• (11:27) - The places most people have never heard of
• (13:42) - Disneyland and the parable of American history
• (15:49) - Lafayette, Tocqueville, and the great travel tradition
• (17:25) - Thirteen trips, six months on the road
• (20:22) - Crisis, catastrophe, and the opportunity for change
• (23:21) - The apocalyptic temptation: from left and right
• (25:13) - Civil rights cities that fell on hard times
• (31:36) - The third road: between pride and shame
• (33:35) - Upstate New York: Douglass, Anthony, and the neighbours who reimagined A...

“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine

This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, the British journalist Sebastian Mallaby argues that Hassabis is, in contrast, one faced. And that face is not only decent, but informed by the enlightened ethics of Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.

Mallaby presents Hassabis as the anti-Altman. He’s stayed at DeepMind for sixteen years, lived in the same London house, drives a decade-old car. Rather than power, Google’s AI supremo seeks scientific enlightenment. Like Spinoza, his God is the master watchmaker of the universe. And so doing science, Hassabis explained to Mallaby in one of their many conversations in the backroom of a North London pub, is like reading the mind of God. Decent Demis. Honest Hassabis. Let’s just hope this modest and thoughtful tech leviathan can bring Kantian ethics to Silicon Valley’s sprint for artificial general intelligence.

Five Takeaways

•       Hassabis Is the Anti-Altman: Sam Altman has managed to annoy almost everyone he’s worked with by saying one thing and doing the opposite. Hassabis has run DeepMind continuously for sixteen years, lives in the same house in Highgate, drives a decade-old car, and spends his discretionary money on Liverpool season tickets. He doesn’t want power. He wants scientific enlightenment. Mallaby uses the word advisedly.

•       Doing Science Is Like Reading the Mind of God: Hassabis is a Spinozan. The god he believes in is the god Einstein talked about — the fabric of reality understood through scientific inquiry. He reads Kant, he reads Spinoza, he reads widely enough to be a proper polymath. Mallaby sat with him in a Highgate pub for more than thirty hours. What he found was not a Silicon Valley sociopath but an enlightenment figure who thinks AI is the modern version of the telescope.

•       The Szilard Pedestrian Crossing: Mallaby asked Hassabis what it felt like to set up DeepMind in 2010. Instead of the usual vague answer, Hassabis painted the scene: the attic office on Russell Square, the heat, the stairs, the greenery outside, the London Mathematical Society three doors down where Turing lectured, and the zebra crossing where the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in the 1930s. The perfect metaphor: DeepMind as the modern Manhattan Project.

•       The Two Categories of Things That Go Wrong: There’s the idiot-in-charge category — an evil or stupid person making bad decisions, and you could swap them out. Then there’s the structural category: a good person trying their best, defeated by larger forces they cannot control. Hassabis is category two. He wants to make AI safe, but race dynamics between US and China labs make safety nearly impossible to deliver. The failure of governments to intervene is the real story. Not individuals.

•       The Go Players Who Quit: When AlphaGo beat the best players in the world, some professional Go players retired — centuries of accumulated human understanding devalued overnight. Others kept playing, using the machine as a tutor to discover patterns they’d never seen. Two responses to superintelligence in one domain. One is mourning. The other is curiosity. Mallaby thinks the second response is the only one worth having. Hassabis agrees.

About the Guest

Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. A former Washington Post columnist and Economist contributing editor, he is the author of More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew (winner of the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year), The Power Law, and now The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.

References:

•       The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby.

•       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mallaby’s quiet counter-argument.

•       Episode 2860: We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us — Keith Teare on agency in our agentic age. Hassabis thinks he can still steer.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - Introduction: the many faces of Sam Altman
• (02:00) - Altman’s duplicity versus Hassabis’s consistency
• (02:56) - The moral wrestling: is this the Manhattan Project?
• (04:45) - The ordinary genius in Highgate
• (06:29) - The Szilard pedestrian crossing and a storyteller off the charts
• (09:10) - Responding to The Guardian: why Hassabis isn’t Altman
• (12:58) - The two categories of things that go wrong
• (14:48) - Mustafa Suleiman’s remarkable backstory
• (17:01) - Did Demis fire Mustafa?
• (19:46) - Class, Eton, and the North London grammar school
• (22:27) - Spinoza, Kant, and the god of science
• (25:27) - Doing science is like reading the mind of God
• (29:57) - Why not Princeton? The money problem
• (34:12) - The secret DeepMind vs Google negotiation
• (43:11) - Is Hassabis the next CEO of Google?
• (48:05) - The Go players who quit

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi

What’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want, a field guide to the big economic forces that shape our working, saving, loving and leisure lives.

Mayyasi argues that money is the last taboo. We talk openly (perhaps too openly) about our sex lives now. But we still don’t talk about our money lives — not with spouses, not with parents, not with our children. Companies that have tried full salary transparency report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender. Thus the need for Mayyasi’s new book. It’s not exactly porn, but Planet Money is designed to liberate us from our last taboo.

Five Takeaways

•       The Economy Was Invented During the Great Depression: If you asked someone a hundred years ago how the economy was doing, you’d get a strange look back. The concept didn’t exist. It was the Depression that forced the question — because Roosevelt and his advisers had no way of knowing whether the New Deal was working. An economist was tasked with the Don Quixote-like job of counting every transaction in America to produce a single number: GDP. We have lived inside that number ever since.

•       Money Is More Embarrassing Than Sex: We talk freely about sex now. We still don’t talk about money — not with spouses, not with parents, not with children. Mayyasi advocates for salary transparency, even though companies that have tried it report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender pay gaps. The discomfort is the point. Maybe we need a Freud of finance to liberate us from the last taboo.

•       Financial Time Travel: Markets give us the ability to move money through time — into the future through saving, or from the future to the present through borrowing. Student loans are the most relatable form: young people pulling their future income backwards to fund the human capital they need to earn it. Consumption smoothing across the life cycle is a perfectly valid use of debt, as long as you don’t assume the future will be richer than it actually turns out to be.

•       Productive Risk Versus Nihilistic Gambling: The GameStop ride looks quaint compared to today’s parlay bets on whether a certain word will appear in the State of the Union. Higher risk, higher reward is a continuum, and savvy careers are built on calculated risks. But there is a difference between productive risk — the kind that builds businesses and careers — and the nihilistic flip of a coin. Knowing the difference is half of financial literacy.

•       Bobby Bonilla and the Magic of Compound Interest: Bonilla agreed to defer his $6 million Mets salary for decades. Every year, the Mets still send him a cheque for over $1 million, which drives Mets fans insane. It looks bone-headed, but it is exactly how every successful retirement plan works: give up consumption now, let compound interest do its work, enjoy something like $30 million in the future. Bonilla was savvier than his critics. We can all learn from him.

About the Guest

Alex Mayyasi is a writer and frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money. His new book, Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want, was published this week.

References:

•       Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want by Alex Mayyasi.

•       Episode 2863: An Anticapitalist Mutiny — Noam Scheiber on the rise and revolt of the college-educated working class. The other side of Planet Money.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:31) - Introduction: things aren’t quite right on Planet Money
• (03:18) - The Great Moderation: a fantastic run that we forgot to celebrate
• (05:49) - The economy was invented during the Great Depression
• (07:52) - Aristotle’s oikonomia: economics has always been personal
• (09:20) - The Planet Money DNA: storytelling and the bank teller who met the ATM
• (13:23) - Why money makes everybody nervous
• (16:02) - Crypto out, AI in: the great pivot of the writing process
• (17:49) - Economists and AI: the longer perspective
• (20:03) - Financial time travel: student loans as moving income through time
• (22:40) - Productive risk versus nihilistic gambling
• (24:41) - Does money make you happy? Beyond the $60,000 plateau
• (27:25) - GDP versus the planet: externalities and corporate DNA
• (30:15) - More embarrassing than sex: why we can’t talk about money
• (33:19) - Salary transparency: the case of Sweden
• (41:47) - Bobby Bonilla, the Mets, and the magic of compound interest
• (45:48) - Insurance as peace of mind

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam Scheiber

A university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times’ Noam Scheiber, the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny, Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been quietly disappearing over the last fifteen years. The result, he argues, is the rise and revolt of what he calls a “college-educated” working class.

Scheiber chose mutiny because it’s a term to describe workers who have lost confidence in management. College graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. The university itself has become extractive — charging the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, marketing video game design programmes to thousands of students who will never make a living from them, lending federal money with no skin in the game.

Scheiber warns that the ideological diploma divide has already closed. By 2020, college graduates were slightly to the left of non-college voters on taxation, regulation, and unions. Sympathy for socialism among college grads doubled between 2010 and 2020. Mamdani won eighty-five per cent of college graduates under thirty in New York City. When the educated radicalise and join forces with the traditional working class, Scheiber notes, the political order changes. This was as true in nineteenth-century China as in Russia in 1917, Iran 1979 and Poland in 1980.

College grads have nothing to lose but their diplomas.

Five Takeaways

•       Mutiny, Not Revolution: Scheiber chose the word deliberately. Mutiny is a workplace term. Sailors who have lost confidence in the captain take matters into their own hands. It taps into the changing sociology of college graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent and now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. This isn’t a violent uprising. It’s a workplace rebellion.

•       The Video Game Design Degree Is the Perfect Scam: Tens of thousands of students each year enrol in college programmes that promise to turn their hobby into a career at a major studio. Only a tiny fraction ever make a living designing games. The marketing isn’t a lie — just a rosier picture than the reality. Universities charge the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, even though we know the returns are vastly different. No other part of the economy works this way.

•       On Economics, the Diploma Divide Has Already Closed: Through the 1980s and 1990s, college graduates were significantly more conservative on economics. By 2012, college and non-college voters were in the exact same place. By 2020, college graduates were slightly to the left. Sympathy for socialism among college grads doubled from twenty to forty per cent between 2010 and 2020. The divide that remains is cultural. The economic majority is sitting out there waiting for a candidate who knows how to address it.

•       The 70/10 Gap: About seventy per cent of Americans support unions in principle. Only ten per cent are actually in one. American labour law gives employers enormous leeway to discourage organising. The gap means traditional unions cannot close the demand. Alternative forms of organising — the Alphabet Workers Union at Google, Amazon employees for climate justice, walkouts and petitions — are becoming the new shape of workplace power.

•       When the College-Educated Radicalise, Politics Disrupts: Nineteenth-century China. The Bolshevik Revolution. Iran 1979. Poland’s Solidarity movement. Spain and Greece after the Great Recession. History shows that when a frustrated educated class joins forces with the traditional working class, the political order changes. The college-educated have agency. They vote, organise, donate, and show up. When they get angry, the political class notices.

About the Guest

Noam Scheiber is a labour and workplace reporter for The New York Times. A former Rhodes Scholar, he is the author of The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery and Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.

References:

•       Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber — the book under discussion.

•       Episode 2861: The Joe Biden Tragedy — Julian Zelizer on the last New Deal president. The political vacuum Scheiber describes.

•       Episode 2859: Stop, Don’t Do That — Peter Edelman on Bobby Kennedy. The progressive populism that could once unite Black and white workers.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

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Chapters:

• (00:31) - Introduction: new book day, the betrayal of college graduates
• (02:46) - Why mutiny, not revolution: a workplace term
• (05:56) - The Rhodes Scholar who became a Starbucks organiser
• (10:10) - Generation morality without class consciousness
• (15:33) - Can the GOP become the party of workers?
• (18:00) - The convergence of college and non-college voters on immigration and crime
• (20:14) - What does betrayal feel like?
• (21:00) - The video game design degree scam
• (24:37) - The university as extractive system
• (27:15) - Was Biden a New Deal president in a post-New Deal age?
• (31:45) - Mamdani and the economic majority that’s sitting out there
• (32:45) - The 70/10 gap: why traditional unions can’t close it
• (35:02) - Tech workers, alternative organising, and the Alphabet Workers Union
• (38:50) - Has the decline of knowledge work begun?
• (40:00) - Luddites or Bolsheviks: when the college-educated radicalise
• (40:55) - Iran 1979, Poland’s Solidarity, and the disruptive power of educated rage