Great Books and the AI Apocalypse (w/ Matt Dinan) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books program at St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. It brings together longtime preoccupations of the show — Saul Bellow's late novel, Ravelstein , Allan Bloom, Straussian political philosophy — with the fraught emergence of LLMs like ChatGPT. This past semester, Dinan took a fairly radical approach to confronting AI in the classroom, and it seemed to work. We consider the art of teaching, the qualities of great teachers, and what it all reveals about an insidious technology's effect on how we live and learn as citizens in, at least for now, a democratic republic. Listen again: " Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow ," June 21, 2021 Sources: Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2000) Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987) Matt Dinan, " Saul Bellow's Ravelstein ," Hedgehog Review , Spring 2025 — " Permission Structures ," Prefaces , Dec 10, 2025 — " It's Not Just a Calculator ," Prefaces , Aug 28, 2024 Jorge Luis Borges, " The Lottery in Babylon ," Collected Fictions (1999) Jonathan Malesic, " ChatGPT Is a Gimmick: AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die ," Hedgehog Review , May 21, 2025 — " Taming the Demon: How desert monks put work in its place ," Commonweal , Feb 2, 2019

You can listen to Great Books and the AI Apocalypse (w/ Matt Dinan) [Teaser] online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Great Books and the AI Apocalypse (w/ Matt Dinan) [Teaser] is an episode from Know Your Enemy by Matthew Sitman.

This episode is 00:05:57 long.

This episode was published on Jan 2, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Know Your Enemy when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.