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“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...

“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.”

“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 ...

“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 [email protected]. 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...

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...

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....

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 ...

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.

“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...

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...

“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 ...

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...

It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation. He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doesn’t mean kindness, empathy, mercy, or even pity. In his new book Karuna (a Sanskrit word that loosely translates into compassion), he defines it as a disruptive force. It means feeling somebody else’s problem as your own and then doing something about it. Which is why, keynoting the UN’s AI for Good summit in Geneva this July, he challenged the executives in the room to send their people to witness suffering. To see the 470 million children living in war zones, the 138 million working as labourers and slaves, the 270 million out of school. That, he guarantees, would make do-gooders genuinely compassionate. Which brings us to artificial intelligence. Satyarthi is no fan of the AI arms race, which he thinks has left Big Tech’s engineers unable to identify the ethical point of their products. But he insists he’s not against the companies themselves and says he remains a believer in their potential humanity. Satyarthi certainly sees the power of AI to change the world. That’s why, last week, he came to Silicon Valley to talk about AI. Geoffrey Hinton told me that he wants AI to acquire a female sensibility. Kailash Satyarthi, in contrast, wants compassion to define AI ethics. One day, no doubt, a compassionate bot, maybe named Karuna, will win a Nobel Prize. If so, we’ll certainly have them on the show. FURTHER READING •   Kailash Satyarthi, Karuna: The Power of Compassion (HarperCollins India, 2026) — also published in Hindi as Karuna: Samaadhaan ki Shakti •   Globalising Compassion — Satyarthi’s own account of the idea, including the four components he sets out in this conversation: awareness, connectedness, feeling and action •   The Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion, launched in New Delhi in 2024, which is now the vehicle for the compassionate-leadership work in technology, governance, academia and the judiciary •   Geoffrey Hinton on the show last year, warning about “alien beings that could take over” — the episode behind the question about building different values into the machines: listen or watch •   Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, arguing that a safe AI system dropped into an authoritarian setting is not a safe system — the mirror image of Satyarthi’s case: listen or watch •   The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson, whose own conversation with Satyarthi about building compassion into AI models comes up here: listen or watch FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. Machines cannot feel, so the compassion has to come from the people building them. This is where he starts, and it is an engineer’s starting point rather than a moralist’s. Codes and algorithms cannot be compassionate and never will be, and he has no interest in pretending otherwise. What he objects to is the companion assumption that the machine is therefore neutral. It is not neutral, because it is made by people who arrive with their own biases, apprehensions, flaws and mindset, and all of that flows into the thing they build. The conclusion he draws is that compassion has to be a design principle at the foundation stage, carried through development and deployment, rather than a correction applied after the harm has been exposed. 2. Compassion, in his usage, is not kindness, and the distinction is the whole argument. He is emphatic about it, and he repeats the list twice in the hour: not kindness, not empathy, not mercy, not pity, not charity, not welfare. Those are good human traits and he does not disown them, but they are not what he means. Compassion as he has spent five decades redefining it is a disruptive, dynamic and transformative force, born from feeling the problems of others as your own and driving you to mindful action to solve them. Shorter: mindful and pragmatic problem solving. It has four components — awareness, connectedness, feeling, and then action — and the fourth is the one that separates his definition from every sentimental version of the word. 3. “AI for Good” invites the obvious follow-up question, which he put to the room in Geneva. Good for whom? He was keynoting the inaugural session of the UN’s AI for Good summit this July, in front of delegations from 177 countries and twelve thousand people from the tech sector, and the challenge he laid down was whether the good in question belonged to world leaders, governments and eight or nine companies. His numbers: 470 million children living in war zones, 138 million working as child labourers and child slaves, 270 million out of school. His practical ask is disarmingly small — send the engineers to spend a week or ten days in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in the war zones of the Middle East, and he will organise the trip himself. His verdict on the race as it stands is that it is an arms race, and that in two years’ time only the regret will remain in our hands. 4. Morality is borrowed from outside; compassion is already inside. This is his quarrel with the responsible-AI vocabulary, and he extends it, politely, to the Pope, whose interventions on technology he otherwise endorses. Ethics, morality and religious sermons all come from outside, he argues, and their priorities keep changing, which is why the world still has its problems despite all the temples, mosques, churches and synagogues. Consciousness and compassion, by contrast, are twin sisters, biological and neurological and native to us. So the task is not to import a code of conduct but to ignite something that is already there — which is also why he insists that his argument is not a theological one, even when the conversation strays into Genesis. 5. The young people in his own office write better and think less. He calls the measurable version of all this the compassion quotient, and his claim is that most of us run a low one, caged by the layers that accumulate from identity to purpose to the prevailing definition of success; exposure to actual suffering raises it, as he has watched happen to the volunteers, researchers and journalists who spend a week in his ashrams. The observation that lands hardest, though, is domestic and unflattering to the technology. The youngsters who work for him can now produce a speech or an article better than he could think of — and there is not a single new creative idea in any of it, just the previous data and the old biases that came with it. The creative power and the inclusivity of the young, he says, are now the matter of concern. ABOUT THE GUEST Kailash Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, jointly with Malala Yousafzai, for his...

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human. Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, reminds us that Arendt wasn’t a postmodern relativist who believed everyone’s opinions were equally credible. Facts mattered to her enormously — but a thousand facts about immigration will not verify migration policy, and two people with Harvard doctorates, especially if they are friends, can still disagree about how many people to let into America. Nor is Berkowitz presenting Hannah Arendt as an anodyne centrist. For Arendt, he argues, people are plural and always will be so. We can, and should, have strong opinions that sometimes cause us to raise our voices in anger. But an argument, she believed, should end in disagreement rather than discord. So, when she and Scholem fell out all over again seventeen years later, this time over her argument about the banality of Nazi evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she hoped it wouldn’t affect their friendship. It’s our ability to disagree and reconcile (which isn’t the same as forgiveness) that makes us human, Arendt says. That’s what we should — indeed, must — share if we are to rebuild our broken world. FURTHER READING •   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026) •   The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, which Berkowitz founded and directs •   Yesterday’s episode featuring Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick, author of AI and Political Freedom, articulating an engineer’s view of politics — listen or watch •   Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy — last week’s episode Berkowitz praises: listen or watch •   Keri Leigh Merritt on the American dissident Lillian Smith, who, like Hannah Arendt, was An Inconvenient Woman: listen or watch FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. Better facts will not fix politics. This is the claim that puts Arendt at odds with almost everyone currently worrying about democracy. We tend to assume that misinformation is the disease and that better education, better journalism and better facts are the cure. Arendt did not believe it. Facts mattered to her enormously, but she insisted they have very little power to tell us what to do: twenty facts about immigration still will not settle immigration, and two people who have both been as well educated as it is possible to be can still disagree about Trump. Berkowitz traces the opposite assumption back to Plato, who watched Athens execute Socrates, concluded the many could not be trusted, and invented the philosopher king to rule in their place. 2. Reconciliation is not forgiveness. Arendt’s distinction here is precise and worldly rather than moral. Forgiveness, as she understood it, is Christian: it implies that you might have done the same, so you should not throw stones. Reconciliation claims nothing of the kind. It says that what you did was wrong, that I would not have done it, that I do not forgive you — and that I am nonetheless willing to love a world with you in it. The condition is that it runs both ways. Heidegger came to her after the war, went down on his knees and turned himself in, and she reconciled. Karl Jaspers never did, and the two of them had their worst row over it in Switzerland in the fifties, ending with each accepting that the other had made a different judgment. 3. And there are people you cannot have in your world. The last two chapters of the book are about the limits, which Berkowitz is at pains to point out are not the same thing as civility. Eichmann is the case that settles it. Arendt’s argument was never that he was a monster; it was that in a normal age he would have been an unremarkable civil servant whom nobody would have heard of. But he did not live in a normal age, and he became a willing and obedient servant of bureaucratic genocide. Her conclusion was not moral outrage but a judgment about what she could live alongside: she could not love a world in which such a person was simply readmitted to it, and so he had to die. The useful corollary, in Berkowitz’s formulation, is that the uncle whose opinions you cannot bear is generally not Eichmann. 4. Totalitarianism is organised loneliness. The line is Arendt’s, and Berkowitz keeps it on the Arendt Center’s website: if totalitarianism is organised loneliness, then the loneliness of modern life means totalitarianism is hardly a phenomenon of the past. His gloss is the darkest stretch of the conversation. Religion has lost most of its public meaning, the family has broken down, and the Western tradition — the banisters we lean on precisely because nobody can think all the time — has shattered. What is left is the atomised individual, and the movements that offer him meaning. Which is why Arendt held that the fundamental political problem of the age is not housing or immigration or even the environment, but meaninglessness, and why anyone hoping to see off fascism has to offer people a life that feels worth living. 5. There is no such thing as a two-week-old friendship. The third element of friendship, after conversation and respect, is simply duration, and Arendt was unsentimental about it. She knew W. H. Auden for twelve years, at one point turning up with Mary McCarthy to clean his notoriously filthy flat, and he proposed marriage; she still said they had met too late in life to become friends. Berkowitz, at fifty-eight, found himself making a list and ringing people up once a month because the friends he had were leaving New York or dying. The argument he draws from it is that friendship takes time nobody has any more, and that if machines are going to take the labour, it is the capacity most worth protecting on the other side. ABOUT THE GUEST Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he is Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Human Rights. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World is published by Yale University Press. He lives in New York. 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.

Matthew Botvinick works at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law. His new book, AI and Political Freedom, focuses on AI’s risk to democracy and how we should respond to it. It’s important to note that for this Princeton University Press book, Botvinick doesn’t represent Anthropic. That said, the fact that he just happens to be a senior policy guy at Dario’s trillion dollar startup makes both Matt and his book particularly intriguing. He obviously knows his AI stuff. He was previously senior director of research at Google DeepMind, and before that ran neural computation labs at Princeton and Penn. He has been doing what we now call deep learning since the early nineteen nineties, when it was called connectionist modelling and few imagined it would ever amount to a commercial product. Then he went back to school for a law degree. Yale, no less. So Matt is clearly an Ivy League-trained, smart logical guy. Somebody to be (mis)trusted. His argument is that AI doesn’t invent a new threat to democracy so much as raise the stakes on the demagogue’s playbook. It’s that familiar Trump/Modi/Orbán/Bolsonaro game of splitting the people from the elites, then, once in office, rewiring the state to entrench power and muzzling anyone who objects. What AI adds, Matt worries, is populist fuel at both ends. Thus the dangerous flammability of our current politics. Job displacement manufactures exactly the insecurity demagogues feed on, and AI hands whoever wins a surveillance and censorship apparatus that no previous authoritarian could dream of. He also expects AI-driven national security crises, and notes that states of emergency are designed to expand executive power, which makes them very easy to abuse. I pushed Matt on whether anyone should believe any of this from a senior Anthropic policy maker. He said no, and probably meant it. There is no reason, he argued, to trust anybody from Anthropic, or any newspaper either, because a marketplace of ideas doesn’t run on trust but on the strength of the argument. Perhaps. But my bigger concern is the ethic of the all-too-logical engineer that Matt brings to politics. As I will discuss tomorrow with the Hannah Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, Arendt argued that politics was anything but an engineering problem with quantifiable fixes. So when Matt promises AI enabling ancient Athens “at scale” through citizen assemblies, we should be wary. Not because this will end humanity or make Anthropic employees exorbitantly rich. But because politics isn’t code, and can’t be fixed by engineers. FURTHER READING •   Matthew Botvinick, AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond (Princeton University Press, 2026) •   The author’s own page for the book: mattbotvinick.com •   Adam Jentleson on Supermajority — the Democratic strategist on rebuilding a governing coalition: listen to that episode •   Susan Neiman on whether Trump is evil — the philosopher on how half of America accepted him twice: listen to that episode •   Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner on the patrimonial turn in American government: listen to that episode •   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026) — Berkowitz is on the show tomorrow FIVE TAKEAWAYS 1. AI doesn’t invent the threat. It raises the stakes. Botvinick is careful to say that AI does not create some exotic new danger to democracy. What it does is sharpen a vulnerability that democracies have always had, and which the American founders worried about explicitly. The pattern he calls the demagogue’s playbook begins with populist appeals that divide the people from an allegedly hijacking elite, and proceeds, once the demagogue is in office, to two objectives: rewiring the machinery of government to entrench power, and muzzling dissent by attacking the press and civil society. AI feeds the first stage and arms the second. 2. Job displacement is the fuel. The mechanism by which AI raises the risk is economic rather than technological. People who feel insecure about their livelihoods and their standing in society look to political leaders to solve problems they cannot solve privately, and that is precisely the demand that demagogues exist to meet. Botvinick is candid that he cannot predict the timeline, because how fast AI diffuses through the economy and how fast employers actually use it to replace labour are harder to forecast than the technology itself. His position is simply that serious displacement is coming and that we should prepare rather than argue about the date. 3. Emergencies and surveillance are the weapons. Two tools in particular worry him. The first is the state of emergency: he expects AI to cause national security crises, cybersecurity above all, and points out that states of emergency are not inherently anti-democratic but are intrinsically designed to expand executive power, which makes them very easy to exploit. The second, and the one he considers more serious, is that AI is an extraordinary instrument of domestic surveillance and censorship — for tracking political opponents, silencing them, and preventing the coordinated action that protest depends on. China, he notes, is not a hypothetical. 4. There is no reason to trust him, and he says so. Asked directly why anyone should believe an Anthropic employee with stock in the company, Botvinick did not reach for a reassurance. There is no reason to trust anybody from Anthropic, he said, just as there is no reason to trust any newspaper; the point of a marketplace of ideas is that it does not run on trust at all, but on the strength of arguments and the information people put into the open. AK pressed back that the marketplace of ideas is itself a contestable position rather than a self-evident truth, which Botvinick accepted without abandoning it. 5. Ancient Athens at scale. The hopeful half of the book rests on the deliberative democracy movement and the citizens’ assemblies championed by the Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore, whom Botvinick calls one of his heroes. These assemblies are good at putting people in a frame of mind to argue openly and from facts, but at present nobody knows how to run one much beyond a hundred participants. The question the book leaves open is whether AI can enlarge them to the scale of a republic without destroying the thing that makes them work — and Botvinick is explicit that this requires experiment rather than deployment. ABOUT THE GUEST Matthew Botvinick is a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law, and a senior fellow at Yale Law School. He was previously se...