What Was America? Katy Siegel and Elise Armani on the Bicentennial We Lost
“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel INTRO I...
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Keen On
The daily show about books, writers, and big ideas. Hosted by Andrew Keen.
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Hyperscale: Paris Marx on the Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires
“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You acc...
The Hope Machine (Holy Shit, My Life is Over): Bill Gross Gives Away 1.2 Million AI-Generated Ideas
“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross INTRO Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas...
Murder by the Numbers: Harold Schechter’s 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime
Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler investigating the gruesome murder of two young...
Murders in the Wiregrass: Matt Kessler on DNA, Doubt and the Deep South
Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was...
The Six Minute War: Michael Dobbs on Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon
On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nucl...
The Last Humans: Alexander Wendt on UFOs, Global Security and the Threat to State Sovereignty
Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the in...
Super Unsexy By Design: Ben Green on Algorithmic Realism
“We don’t have to choose between AI and no AI. The bigger choice is what type of AI we want, and who we want in control of it.” — Ben Green...
Eliot Cohen is The Strategist: How to Think About War & Politics
Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a...
An American Tragedy in Five Acts: Janet Reitman on the Inheritance of 9/11
“They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet Reitman Back in 2022, the ex-Marine Ellio...
Crowning Our Engineer Kings: Jensen Huang for President?
Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful en...
Karuna Karuna: Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi on Why Compassion Must Be Designed Into AI
It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Jo...
A World We Share: Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship
“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critic...
AI and Political Freedom: Anthropic's Matthew Botvinick on the Risk to Democracy and How to Respond
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 Pol...
The President and the Oligarch: Greg Steinmetz on FDR’s Vendetta Against Andrew Mellon
The retired money manager Greg Steinmetz has now written three books about very rich men. The first, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived , was ab...
Do We All Really Need a Digital Chief of Staff? Grok Bot, Dot and Muse Say Yes (Duh)
Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to...
The Future of Truth: How AI Reshaped Steven Rosenbaum’s Reality
“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum In April , the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on th...
Everything Is Everything: Steven E. Jones on Tom Wilson & the Magic of 1966
“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones Five year...
How to Survive Authoritarianism: Dan Storyev on a Russian Phrasebook for America
“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan St...
An Inconvenient Woman: Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America
“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt In April, Gal...