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“I don't like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I'm losing a part of myself in the process.” — Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory ChampionMost of us can't remember our spouse's phone number. We barely know our own. We haven't read a physical map in years. Some of us don't even know what a map is. Such is the impoverishment of mental life in our digital age.Nelson Dellis, unlike most of us, is a rich man — at least mentally. He can memorise a shuffled deck of 52 cards in under a minute. He stores every stranger's phone number in his head for 24 hours before putting it in his phone — on principle. He's a six-time USA Memory Champion, a computer science professor at Skidmore, and the author of a new book, Everyday Genius, which suggests we can all be a lot smarter than our smart phones.Dellis got into memory after watching his grandmother get lost in the fog of Alzheimer's. And as a computer science professor, he's equally terrified by what he now sees in the classroom. His students can't craft an email without ChatGPT. They can't focus. They can't solve a problem without asking a machine. He warns that we're outsourcing our cognitive agency to devices and mislabelling it as human productivity.For Dellis, it's the same mental atrophy that destroyed his grandmother. AI-generated mnemonics, he warns, feel “dead inside.” Our brains, like our language, are degenerating into slop. Thus the value of his hacks to restore our focus and boost our memories. Five Takeaways•       I Can't Remember My Wife's Phone Number: Neither can you. Neither can anyone under 50. We've outsourced our memories to devices and the consequences are only beginning to show. Nelson Dellis memorises every new phone number for 24 hours before putting it in his phone. Not because he needs to — because his brain needs him to.•       His Grandmother Disappeared into Alzheimer's and It Changed His Life: Dellis watched the woman who raised him become a shell of herself — unable to recognise her own grandson. He went down a rabbit hole into memory science, discovered a former champion's audiobook, tried the techniques, and was hooked. He won his first US Memory Championship within two years. He's won six.•       If Everyone's a Genius, Nobody Is: I pushed back on the book's premise. Dellis conceded the point but held his ground: the techniques are learnable, the results are real, and the distinction between “genius” and “trained” matters less than the distinction between a brain that's exercised and one that's atrophying. The London cab driver study is his best evidence — hippocampi that grow with use and shrink without it.•       AI Slop Is by Definition Forgettable: Dellis teaches computer science, so he's no Luddite. But AI-generated mnemonics, he says, feel “dead inside.” The vivid, absurd, grotesque images that make memory techniques work are products of individual human imagination. A machine can't generate weirdness. Not yet. Maybe not ever. His students can't write an email without ChatGPT. That should terrify us more than it does.•       Eat Your Blueberries: Four pillars of brain health: mental exercise, physical fitness, diet, and — the one that surprises people — social interaction. Dellis trains a 90-year-old and a five-year-old using the same techniques. Both can do things their peers cannot. The brain doesn't expire at 70. But it does atrophy if you let your iPhone do the thinking. About the GuestNelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2021, 2024), certified mountaineer and Everest summiteer, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Skidmore College. His new book is Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem-Solving, and Much More. He has taught memory techniques to audiences ranging from five-year-olds to nonagenarians.References:•       Everyday Genius by Nelson Dellis — the book under discussion, currently the number one new release in memory improvement on Amazon.•       Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer — the bestselling account of competitive memory that Dellis discusses and Foer, a friend of his, promoted at the same event where Dellis won his first title.•       Episode 2835: Why Dario Amodei Might Be the 21st Century's First Real Leader — this week's TWTW, where Keith Teare covered AI disruption from the tech side.•       USA Memory Championship — the annual competition Dellis has won six times.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: we've never had a memory champion (01:23) - Is everyone a genius? The soccer medal problem (03:25) - Controlling the thing inside our skull (05:07) - The brain as the most complicated object in the universe (06:40) - Grandmother's Alzheimer's: the origin story (08:26) - Can brain training delay Alzheimer's? (11:53) - Mental longevity vs. the iPhone warranty (13:46) - Inside the USA Memory Championship (15:52) - Numbers, cards, names, poems: the events (18:13) - Joshua Foer and Moonwalking with Einstein (21:28) - Social genius: loneliness as cognitive decline (24:43) - Blueberries, omega-3s, and pre-competition doping (27:24) - Freaks or trained humans? (31:01) - Your iPhone is atrophying your brain (37:51) - AI slop: why machines can't make memories (39:23) - Hack: how to remember any name you hear

Victoria Vaughan, an award-winning business leader and communication strategist, is the founder of B612, a New York–based PR agency serving high-growth technology companies. B612 clients are featured in top tier outlets such as NYT, WSJ, TechCrunch, Wired and have raised over $100m in funding in 2025. With over a decade in tech communications, Victoria previously served as CEO of the top-tier Web3 media company Cointelegraph, directly managing media strategy and operations. She was named a Best Business Owner by NYX awards'25.

“If we don't fight, then what are we doing?” — Jeff BoydHow do you write fiction about contemporary America when reality itself is stranger than fiction? A country in which “alternative facts” is policy rather than satire. Where “truth” has been nationalized.Jeff Boyd, an acclaimed young American novelist, sees fiction as refuge. For both writer and reader, it gets us inside the heads of people who both inflict and endure pain. And it enables the senseless to make sense. The news cycle can't do that. A novel can.Boyd's second novel, Hard Times, out today, is his latest attempt to make sense of the senseless. No, the title isn't Dickensian — it's from Curtis Mayfield. The song on the 1975 “There's No Place Like America Today” album, with its cover juxtaposing some happy Americans in a car with others waiting miserably in the unemployment line. America might be great — but for whom, exactly? That dichotomy shapes Hard Times, which is set in a school on the South Side of Chicago where an innocent student gets shot and nobody can agree on what happened or why.Is the American Dream over? Boyd isn't quite sure. “As much as it feels impossible,” he says, “some part of me always wants to believe.” His characters fight — backs against the wall, cards stacked against them, but they don't give in. That's what Curtis Mayfield was singing about in 1975 and it's what Jeff Boyd is writing about in 2026. The times are hard. A time, once again, for novelists to seize back reality. Five Takeaways•       How Do You Make Stuff Up When Reality Is Already Unbelievable? Boyd admits he sometimes wonders what the point of being a novelist is when the headlines are stranger than fiction. His answer: fiction is a refuge. It lets you get inside the heads of people who inflict pain or endure it, and try to make sense of what in reality remains senseless. The novelist can provide an answer. The news cycle can't.•       Not Dickens — Curtis Mayfield: The title comes not from the 1854 novel but from the 1975 song on There's No Place Like America Today. The album cover says it all: happy people in the car, desperate people in the unemployment line. America is great — but great for whom? That dichotomy drives the book.•       A Policeman's Son on George Floyd: One of the officers who stood by while George Floyd died was black — a man whose family had been proud of him for getting the job, who went in wanting to do good. Boyd can't write off an entire category of people. His black cop character in Hard Times exists to show the complexity of wanting to do right and getting caught up in wrong.•       Fate vs. Agency on the South Side: Boyd's grad school friend — not religious but deterministic — argued you could draw a line from where someone starts to where they'll end up. Boyd's characters fight against that line. A kid from a broken home on food stamps doesn't have to end where you think. The novel asks whether the line holds or breaks.•       The Fight Goes On: Is the American Dream over? Boyd isn't quite sure. His characters have their backs against the wall and the cards stacked against them, but they don't give in. That's what Curtis Mayfield was singing about in 1975. It's what Boyd is writing about in 2026. The times are hard. The fight goes on. About the GuestJeff Boyd is the author of The Weight (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Hard Times (Flatiron Books, 2026). A former Chicago public school teacher and graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Fiction, he lives in Brooklyn with his family.References:•       Hard Times: A Novel by Jeff Boyd (Flatiron Books, 2026) — the book under discussion, out today. Starred review from Publishers Weekly.•       The Weight by Jeff Boyd (Simon & Schuster, 2023) — Boyd's acclaimed debut novel, set in Portland.•       Curtis Mayfield, “Hard Times” from There's No Place Like America Today (1975) — the song that gives the novel its title.•       Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) — the Dickensian social realist tradition Boyd consciously works within.•       Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) — referenced in the conversation.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: Hard Times from Dickens to today (01:19) - Not Dickens — Curtis Mayfield (02:44) - The Obama era and the fall back into hard times (05:32) - How do you fictionalize a reality stranger than fiction? (08:44) - Autobiography: teaching in a Chicago school (10:18) - Fate, predestination, and fighting the line (12:49) - The novelist as God — do your characters surprise you? (15:02) - A student is shot: the journalist-novelist (15:33) - Social realism in the Dickensian tradition (18:45) - Chicago stereotypes and the beauty between blocks (22:19) - A policeman's son on George Floyd and the black cop who stood by (25:27) - Teaching as the most underappreciated job in America (27:57) - Money, class, and Black Chicago beyond the stereotype (29:43) - Trump, alternative facts, and who controls the truth (32:19) - The American Dream: is it over?

Jim Lanzone is the CEO of Yahoo. It's basically impossible to sum up Yahoo's story over the last 25 years, but the short version is that once upon a time, Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and everything immediately went sideways. Jim calls it Yahoo's original sin. But after a long series of mergers, spinouts, and a hot, weird minute as part of Verizon Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company — and it's growing. But can Yahoo really take market share from Google? Links:  Yahoo sells Engadget to Static Media | The Verge Yahoo sells TechCrunch to Regent | The Verge Yahoo Finance launches crypto partnership with Coinbase | Yahoo Yahoo Scout looks like more web-friendly AI search | The Verge Yahoo Finance launches crypto deal with Polymarket | Yahoo Finance Yahoo resurrects Artifact inside AI-powered news app | The Verge Yahoo Mail adds more AI to simplify desktop email | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“You would not want to be me.” — Elon MuskYesterday I argued that Dario Amodei is the most interesting man in America because he's doing something nobody else has the balls to do: acting like a human being in public. Elon Musk is the opposite. He has the balls — nobody would deny that — but what's missing is the human-being. Or perhaps Elon is all-too-human, which explains why so many of us — including myself — loathe him.Charles Steel, a London investor, doesn't loathe Elon. In fact, he's self-published a book about him: The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: Nine Ways He Thinks Differently. Rather than an Elon hagiography, Steel insists, it's an attempt to explain why Musk admirers don't fully understand him, and the Hate-Elon crowd would probably loathe him for different reasons even if they had full navigation rights to his mind.As I said, I'm in the second camp. My dislike of Musk is political — the cosying up to Trump, the DOGE fiasco, the embrace of far-right groups, the transformation of Twitter into a safe space for misanthropes. But Steel makes a case that, in our therapeutic culture, might be harder for some to dismiss: Musk's “curious mind” is the product of childhood bullying, high-functioning autism, an abusive father, and an existential crisis resolved not by philosophy but by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently Elon read Nietzsche and that, of course, only compounded his existential crisis. Probably because Nietzsche was warning us about a future dominated by philistines like Elon Musk.In navigating the Musk mind, Steel discovers three traits: hyper-rationality, existential angst, and belligerence. Lots of Silicon Valley founders have the first. Some have the second. Almost none have the third. The combination produces a man who genuinely believes that the scientific method — the right of anyone to criticize anything — is a secular religion, and that “wokeness” is a competing religion that must be destroyed. Whether or not you buy this self-serving argument, Steel might be right to stress a Musk worldview — even if that worldview is often childishly indefensible.I suggested to Steel that Musk is trapped in a Hobbesian state of nature — frozen alone, unable to read other people, incapable of separating himself from himself. A kind of naturally narcissistic state. This is what I most dislike about Elon. That he's normalizing this state of nature. Nietzsche might (like his contemporary disciple Peter Thiel) have called him the Anti-Christ. He's certainly the anti-Dario. Five Takeaways•       Musk Is the Anti-Dario: Amodei acts like a human being in public. Musk has the balls but what's missing is the human-being. Or perhaps he's all-too-human, which explains why so many of us loathe him. The contrast between them is the story of Silicon Valley in 2026.•       Steel's Case Is Harder to Dismiss Than You'd Think: Musk's “curious mind” is the product of childhood bullying, high-functioning autism, an abusive father, and an existential crisis resolved not by philosophy but by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He read Nietzsche and it made things worse. Probably because Nietzsche was warning us about philistines like Musk.•       Three Traits: Hyper-Rationality, Angst, and Belligerence: Lots of Silicon Valley founders have the first. Some have the second. Almost none have the third. The combination produces a man who believes the scientific method is a secular religion and wokeness is a competing one that must be destroyed. Whether or not you buy this self-serving argument, Steel might be right to stress a Musk worldview — even if it's often childishly indefensible.•       Trapped in a Hobbesian State of Nature: Musk is frozen alone, unable to read other people, incapable of separating himself from himself. A kind of naturally narcissistic state. What's most dangerous about Elon is that he's normalising this state of nature for the rest of us.•       The Anti-Christ and the Anti-Dario: Nietzsche might, like his contemporary disciple Peter Thiel, have called Musk the Anti-Christ. He's certainly the anti-Dario. The contrast between Amodei and Musk is the story of Silicon Valley — and perhaps America — in 2026. About the GuestCharles Steel is a London-based investor and writer. He has worked with Tony Blair and Save the Children. His book The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: Nine Ways He Thinks Differently is self-published and out now. His next project is on Albert Camus.References:•       The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: Nine Ways He Thinks Differently by Charles Steel — the book under discussion.•       Episode 2835: Why Dario Amodei Might Be the 21st Century's First Real Leader — yesterday's TWTW, the direct counterpoint.•       Zero to One by Peter Thiel — referenced by Steel on Asperger-like traits and Silicon Valley success.•       The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — the book Musk credits with resolving his existential crisis.•       The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus — Steel's next project, and the question he'd most like to discuss with Musk.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: I'm not a great fan of Elon Musk (02:05) - Is Musk on the spectrum? (03:56) - The meaning of life and the philosophy of curiosity (05:58) - Childhood bullying, an abusive father, and Musk as casualty (06:53) - “You would not want to be me” (08:38) - Hobbes, the state of nature, and Musk as pre-social man (10:29) - Should we try to be less normal? (12:15) - Racism, empathy, and the missing human attributes (14:14) - Goebbels comparison: when does curiosity become offensive? (15:52) - Why is it always the right? Musk and wokeness (17:18) - The curious mind as mirror of ou...

“Whether you like Amodei or not, at least he's a leader.” — Andrew KeenDario Amodei is the most interesting man in America right now. Not because he runs a $500 billion company or because he's suing the Trump administration or because Anthropic's Claude topped the iPhone charts. But because he's doing something nobody else in Silicon Valley has the balls to do: he's acting like a human being in public. He has principles, he states them, and he accepts the consequences. That's leadership. It shouldn't be remarkable. In 2026, it is.This week's That Was The Week is about how America both loves and hates AI. An NBC poll found 60–70% of Americans are concerned about AI — making it even less popular than the Democratic Party (quite an achievement). A hundred planned data centers have been cancelled because of local protests. 10,000 authors published an anti AI manifesto at the London Book Fair this week. Each week, in contrast, a billion people used ChatGPT, but these users often seem oblivious to its weaknesses. So Keith's AI-generated video for the show was, by universal agreement (including his own), not going to win an Oscar tomorrow. Except for Most Sloppy AI generated video.Every road this week led back to Amodei who is anything but sloppy. He's become a Rorschach test for the entire industry. Tech progressives Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are lauding him. The MAGA crowd — including David Sacks, Trump's AI czar — on the All In podcast are doing the opposite. Keith thinks Dario is a naive CEO making bad business decisions — comparing him to his own doomed battle in the late Nineties against Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. It's a fair point. Should a tech CEO really be setting AI policy? Keith's answer is no — that's for people like David Sacks appointed by executive, legislative, and judicial branches. I'm not so sure. In an America defined by its dysfunctional political system, we need leaders like Amodei to take ethical stands. If not, then who?The IPO race this year between Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI makes this particularly interesting. I wonder whether Amodei might use the IPO itself to force a public debate that nobody in government is willing to have. Not just about guardrails or weapons — but about what kind of society AI is building and who gets to decide what does and doesn't get used. Musk, by publicly embracing white racists and other groups of hate, is making his politics clear. Sam Altman, as always, is wearing every hat simultaneously. Amodei, in contrast, knows his hat. Rather than MAGA, it should say: The Most Interesting Man in America. He's got my vote. Even if he's not running for office. Five Takeaways•       AI Is Less Popular Than the Democrats: An NBC poll found 60–70% of Americans are concerned about AI. A hundred data centres have been cancelled due to local protests. 10,000 authors published an anti-AI manifesto at the London Book Fair. Close to a billion people use ChatGPT each week — but the haters are the non-users, and they outnumber the lovers by a wide margin.•       Amodei Is the 21st Century's First Real Leader: He's suing the Trump administration. He's refusing to let Claude be used for autonomous weapons. He's accepting the business consequences. Keith thinks he's naive. I think he's the only person in Silicon Valley acting like a human being in public. The debate between us is the show.•       Keith Compares Amodei to His Own Doomed Battle Against Ballmer: In the late Nineties, Keith fought Microsoft with RealNames and lost. He sees Amodei on the same trajectory — noble, principled, already finished. I compared Keith to Pete Hegseth declaring the Iranian regime defeated. The MAGA crowd on All In, including Trump's AI czar David Sacks, agree with Keith. That alone should give him pause.•       The IPO Race Will Force the Debate: Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI are all expected to go public this year. Amodei could use the IPO to force a conversation about what kind of society AI is building — a conversation nobody in government is willing to have. Musk is making his politics clear by embracing white racists. Altman is wearing every hat. Amodei knows his.•       In the Absence of Leadership, Fear Thrives: Keith's best point of the week. Nobody is setting AI policy. The politicians are clowns. The tech CEOs are children. In the vacuum, fear wins. Amodei is trying to fill it. Whether he succeeds or not, at least he's trying. That's more than anyone else can say. About the GuestKeith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week and co-founder of SignalRank. He is a serial entrepreneur, former CEO of RealNames, and a regular sparring partner on Keen On America.References:•       That Was The Week: AI Loved and Hated — Keith Teare's editorial.•       Rex Woodbury, “Why Does Everybody Hate AI?” — Digital Native.•       Josh Dzieza, The Verge — on lawyers, PhDs, and scientists in the AI gig economy.•       Noah Smith — “Something Feels Weird About This Economy.”•       Meta's acquisition of Moltbook — the AI agent social network.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: AI loved and hated (01:17) - NBC poll: AI less popular than the Democrats (03:10) - Rex Woodbury and the haters: is it really AI people hate? (04:21) - AI slop and Keith's terrible video (07:28) - The adoption curve: AI companies are isolated from mainstream opinion (07:51) - Dario Amodei as the answer to both lovers and haters (10:14) - Keith vs Ballmer redux: why Amodei has already lost (12:09) - OpenAI and Google employees rush to Anthropic's defense (14:24) - Woodbury, The Verge, and AI taking jobs (16:51) - Keith's Apple TV app: vibe coded in a weekend (19:29) - AI will destroy universities: cheating at apocalyptic levels (21:41) - Noah Smith: something feels weird about this economy (27:00) - The IPO race: Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX (30:42) - Could Amodei blow up the IPO proce...

“They all did it. They're all guilty.” — Amy LittlefieldWho killed Roe? Amy Littlefield, the abortion access correspondent at The Nation and big time Agatha Christie fan, has written a true crime book about it. Literally. Killers of Roe treats the death of the constitutional right to abortion as a murder mystery in the Poirot or Miss Marple tradition, complete with suspects, motives, and a forensic reconstruction of the 50-year crime scene. The suspects have Christie-style names: the Racist (Jesse Helms), the Little Brother (James Buckley), the Devout Bureaucrat (Paul Herring), the Closeted Congressman (Bob Bauman), and of course Mr Hyde Amendment himself, Henry Hyde — six foot three, helmet of white hair, serial groper of women who ensured poor women lost access first.The Hyde Amendment is where the crime begins: 1976, a ban on federal funding of abortion. If you're poor, the Supreme Court ruled, that's your problem. The constitutional right exists, but don't expect anyone to pay for it. Surprise surprise. Black women, low-income women, women on Medicaid understood immediately. Democrats and mainstream pro-choice groups took longer to notice. By which time the damage was done — and the playbook established: chip away at access rather than try to ban it outright.Littlefield is more Miss Marple than Poirot — unassuming, persistent, sitting with her suspects for hours until they tell her why they did it. The devout bureaucrat, Paul Herring, spent their interviews trying to convert her to Catholicism. Henry Hyde made a pass at the president of Planned Parenthood during a commercial break on the Phil Donahue show. Bob Bauman — closeted, adopted, alcoholic — confessed to her that his anti-abortion politics may have come from identifying with the unwanted fetus, because that could have been him. These are complicated people doing terrible things for reasons they believe are righteous.And the ending? Littlefield steals it from Murder on the Orient Express. They all did it. Every suspect is guilty — including the Democrats who failed to defend poor women, and the pro-choice movement that didn't fight hard enough for the most vulnerable. Since the Dobbs decision in 2022: 59 excess pregnancy-associated deaths, 500 additional infant deaths, 22,000 additional births. The numbers aren't a Miss Marple mystery. The crime is ongoing. And Trump, who declared himself “very pro-choice” before he appointed the justices who drove the final nail in, is the ultimate opportunist — a fat, orange haired version of Hyde. Murder on the Abortion Express. They all did it. All the men, at least. Five Takeaways•       The Hyde Amendment Is Where the Crime Begins: 1976. A ban on federal funding of abortion. Poor women lost access first. Black women, women on Medicaid understood immediately. Democrats and mainstream pro-choice groups took longer to notice. By which time the playbook was established.•       The Anti-Abortion Movement Stole the Language of Civil Rights: White conservatives who didn't want to think about the harms of white supremacy found an escape valve: their own civil rights movement, with the fetus — almost always imagined as white — as the victim.•       The Suspects Are Complicated. The Crime Is Not: Henry Hyde groped women during commercial breaks. Bob Bauman — closeted, adopted, alcoholic — identified with the unwanted fetus. Paul Herring tried to convert Littlefield to Catholicism. Complicated people, terrible consequences.•       The Numbers Are Real: Since the Dobbs decision in 2022: 59 excess pregnancy-associated deaths. 500 additional infant deaths. 22,000 additional births. The crime is ongoing.•       They All Did It: Littlefield steals her ending from Murder on the Orient Express. Every suspect is guilty — including the Democrats who failed to defend poor women, and the pro-choice movement that didn't fight hard enough for the most vulnerable. All the men, at least. About the GuestAmy Littlefield is the abortion access correspondent at The Nation. Her new book is Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights. She is based in Boston.References:•       Killers of Roe by Amy Littlefield — the book under discussion.•       The Hyde Amendment (1976) — the ban on federal funding of abortion that first stripped access from poor women on Medicaid.•       The Helms Amendment — Jesse Helms' restriction on abortion funding abroad through USAID, leading to thousands of preventable deaths worldwide.•       Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) — the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.•       Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie — the structural model for Littlefield's conclusion: they all did it.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:

“I can point to things. But is that a systemic explanation? I think there the answer is a little less clear. I mean, surely people need love and all of that, but then there's this risk of just devolving into platitude.” — David SussilloDavid Sussillo is a big time neural reverse engineer. The Stanford brain scientist worked at Google Brain with Geoffrey Hinton, and now is at Meta Reality Labs. What distinguishes Sussillo, however, is not his Silicon Valley good luck, but the bad luck of his origins. In his memoir, Emergent: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of the Mind, Sussillo begins at the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home — a modern-day orphanage — and the Milton Hershey School, the boarding school endowed by the chocolate magnate for kids with nowhere else to go. Both his parents were addicts. His mom died young. His dad spent his life as an untrained preacher ministering to homeless people on the streets of Albuquerque while managing a lifelong heroin habit.The book's thesis borrows from the science he studies: “emergence” — simple things interacting to produce complex behaviour that none of them could produce alone. His life is both proof of and a challenge to this concept. He made it out. Most of the kids he grew up with didn't. He can point to moments — a gifted-and-talented test in third grade, an aunt and uncle's intervention at nine, a first love in college — but he can't build an explanatory system from these haphazard events. The Sussillo quilt doesn't have an innate pattern. It just has patches.What makes Sussillo unusual as a memoirist is his refusal to sentimentalise. Twenty years of psychotherapy, he confesses, has taught him something most authors never learn: that understanding your own story doesn't mean you've explained it. His science can't explain his childhood either. “The big dirty secret of neuroscience,” he says, “is that we don't really understand much in the ways that people would love us to understand.” The man who reverse-engineers neural networks can't reverse-engineer himself.I asked him whether having children would have been harder than writing the book. Yes, he said. With the book, you can take a break. With kids, you relive things through a very specific way of relating. He and his wife chose not to. His mentors all told him he'd have been great at it. He's not so sure. That honesty — the willingness to say “I don't know” and mean it — runs through everything Sussillo does. He says he's happy, claiming to have found peace with his past. But he still carries the baggage. Who wouldn't? He's just learned to manage it. Emergent, not emerged. Five Takeaways•       From Orphanage to Google Brain: Both parents were heroin addicts. Sussillo grew up in a modern-day orphanage in Albuquerque and then the Milton Hershey School. He went on to work at Google Brain with Geoffrey Hinton, now works at Meta Reality Labs, teaches at Stanford. Most of the kids he grew up with didn't make it.•       Emergence as Autobiography: The book's thesis borrows from the science he studies: simple pieces combining into complicated outcomes. His life is the proof of concept and the counter-example simultaneously. The quilt doesn't have a pattern. It just has patches.•       The Dirty Secret of Neuroscience: The man who reverse-engineers neural networks can't reverse-engineer himself. “We don't really understand much in the ways that people would love us to understand.” Twenty years of therapy taught him more than the science.•       Would Kids Have Been Harder Than the Book? Yes. With the book, you can take a break. With kids, you relive trauma through a very specific way of relating. He and his wife chose not to have children. His mentors told him he'd have been great at it. He's not so sure.•       Emergent, Not Emerged: Sussillo has found peace with his past. He's happy. He still carries the baggage from his childhood. He's just learned how to manage it. The emergence is ongoing. About the GuestDavid Sussillo is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs and a consulting professor at Stanford University. He previously worked at Google Brain. His memoir is Emergent: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of the Mind. He grew up in the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home and the Milton Hershey School. He lives in New Mexico.References:•       Emergent: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of the Mind by David Sussillo — the book under discussion.•       The Albuquerque Christian Children's Home — the group home where Sussillo spent five years of his childhood.•       The Milton Hershey School — founded in 1906 by the Hershey chocolate magnate for children with nowhere else to go. Sussillo spent four years there.•       Google Brain — the lab where Sussillo worked alongside Geoffrey Hinton on the neural network research that became the foundation of modern AI.•       John Conway's Game of Life — the cellular automaton simulation Sussillo cites as an early example of emergence: complicated outcomes from simple rules.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction (01:30) - The Albuquerque Christian Children's Home and Milton Hershey School (03:30) - Why write a memoir? Five years and twenty years of therapy (05:00) - Heroin-addicted parents: the origin story (08:00) - A father as untrained preacher on the streets of Albuquerque (10:00) - Which parent had more impact? (12:00) - The gifted-and-talented test that changed everything (15:00) - From Milton Hershey to Carnegie Mellon: the jump (18:00) - Life falls apart at 23: panic attacks and psychotherapy (21:00) - Neural networks, Google Brain, and the dirty secret of neuroscience (25:00) - Would having kids have been harder than writing the book? (28:00) - The Albanian friend and the beach: what America gets right (31:00) - Silicon...

The Friday Five for March 13, 2026: Headline Quick Hits AI & Critical Thinking CMS Notification: 1.3 Million MBI Reassignments 2026 Medicare Part D Enrollment Stats Medicare GLP-1 Bridge Demonstration   Get Connected:

Our 236th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/06/2026Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie HarrisFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.aiRead out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/In this episode:* OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Pro with a 1M-token context window, mid-response course correction, native computer-use capabilities, improved tool use, higher GPT-VAL performance (83%), and “high cyber capability” safety measures; OpenAI also launched GPT-5.3 Instant with a less “preachy” tone and a claimed 26.8% hallucination reduction.* Google upgraded Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite with faster time-to-first-token and higher throughput, released a CLI for integrating agents with Gmail/Drive/Docs, and discussion highlighted real-world agent failure risks (including an example of an AI-driven mass email deletion).* Luma launched unified multimodal models and Luma Agents for end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio, including a reported ad localization use case completed in 40 hours for under $20,000.* Defense-contract controversy escalated: Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk (later narrowed), OpenAI's DoD contract language emphasized “all lawful uses,” consumer cancellations boosted Claude's app rankings, OpenAI saw departures and announced a $110B raise at a $730B valuation, Alibaba lost key Qwen leaders, a lawsuit alleged Gemini contributed to a suicide, Anthropic warned of major labor disruption, and METR corrected its AI time-horizon estimates.A thank you to our current sponsors:Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn moreODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a yearTimestamps:(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:01:19) News PreviewTools & Apps(00:02:10) OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with Pro and Thinking versions | TechCrunch(00:12:31) OpenAI GPT-5.3 Instant less likely to beat around the bush • The Register(00:16:07) Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite at 1/8th the cost of Pro | VentureBeat(00:19:23) Google makes Gmail, Drive, and Docs 'agent-ready' for OpenClaw | PCWorld(00:27:02) Luma launches creative AI agents powered by its new ‘Unified Intelligence' models | TechCrunchApplications & Business(00:30:05) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls OpenAI's messaging around military deal 'straight up lies,' report says | TechCrunch(00:41:56) No ethics at all': the 'cancel ChatGPT' trend is growing after OpenAI signs a deal with the US military | TechRadar(00:45:54) OpenAI raises $110B in one of the largest private funding rounds in history | TechCrunch(00:56:07) Alibaba scrambles after sudden departure of Qwen tech leadPolicy & Safety(01:00:12) Pentagon approves OpenAI safety red lines after dumping Anthropic + Where things stand with the Department of War Anthropic + Microsoft says Anthropic's products remain available to customers after Pentagon blacklist(01:09:11) A new lawsuit claims Gemini assisted in suicide | Semafor(01:15:24) Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace. A 'Great Recession for white-collar workers' is absolutely possible | Fortune(01:21:54) We're correcting a mistake in our modeling that inflated recent 50%-time horizons by 10-20%See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“It's about blood. I cover a lot of bloodshed in the book, but I also talk about a different kind of blood: blood that ties, blood that binds families across time and distance.” — Jazmine UlloaKristi Noem is gone. Under her tenure, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — double the previous year's toll. But Jazmine Ulloa, the New York Times' national immigration reporter, doesn't think much will change. Noem wasn't really the point, she insists. The MAGA spectacle rolls on. Stephen Miller's violently anti-immigrant agenda remains. And hysterical conservatives like Peter Schweizer are still writing books about how the Mexican government is “weaponizing” immigration by sending their people over the border.Ulloa grew up three minutes from the Walmart where a self-proclaimed white supremacist drove nine hours from North Texas in August 2019, opened fire, and told an officer he was there to kill Mexicans. Her closest friend's father escaped the parking lot as the shooting started. And it inspired her to write El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory — a chronicle of El Paso as the 21st century Ellis Island.Her argument, made through five families over a century, is that El Paso is not an exception to America. It is America. Latino identity has always been American identity. The Southwest sat on Mexican land before it was American. The border was never a clean line — it was always a contested negotiation, shifting beneath the feet of families who crossed it for work, for survival, for birthday parties in Juárez. The “detention and deportation machine,” she is careful to note, was built by both parties over many decades. Trump didn't invent it. He simply applied his scattershot cruelty to it.What does feel new, Ulloa says, is how El Paso has become every American city — the same tactics long deployed at the border now rolling into Minneapolis and Chicago, snagging US citizens on the basis of how they look or how they speak. Some think this represents uncharted civil liberties territory. Border communities have been sounding this alarm for years, Ulloa notes. Nobody listened. Perhaps they will now.Jazmine Ulloa's El Paso is also, quietly, a love letter — to the city, to its 80% Hispanic population, to the corrido tradition, to a place where magical realism is not a literary device but a way of life. Ulloa wanted the prose to sound like your tío telling stories over coffee. “Borders or bridges?” is the question El Paso has always been answering for generations. Now America is asking the same question. Five Takeaways•       The Machine Predates Trump: The deportation and detention apparatus dominating today's headlines was constructed under both Democratic and Republican administrations across many decades — a bipartisan inheritance that Trump has amplified but did not originate.•       Noem's Exit Changes Nothing: Relief crossed party lines when she was fired, but Ulloa is clear-eyed: Stephen Miller's agenda remains intact, border crossings remain suppressed, and the same systemic challenges will persist under whoever takes over DHS.•       El Paso Is America's Ellis Island — and Its Mirror: The city, 80% Hispanic and straddling two nations, has long been the place where immigration policy is made in the flesh. American identity has always been a negotiation — never a fixed truth, always contested terrain.•       Nativism Is Not an Aberration: From the Chinese Exclusion Acts to the KKK-backed Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, fear of the outsider has been a structural feature of US immigration policy — not a deviation from American values, but an uncomfortable expression of them.•       The Border Is Moving Inward: What was once contained to border communities — racial profiling, mass sweeps, civil liberties erosions — is now spreading into the American heartland. What Ulloa sees as genuinely new is the response: ordinary citizens coming out in their pajamas to document it. About the GuestJazmine Ulloa is the national immigration reporter for the New York Times. She is a former State House reporter for the Los Angeles Times and previously covered national politics for the Boston Globe. Her new book is El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory (Dutton/Penguin Random House, 2026). Born and raised in El Paso, she lives there now.References:•       El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa (Dutton/Penguin Random House, 2026).•       Episode 2830: So Are All Immigrants Manchurian Candidates? Peter Schweizer on Weaponizing Immigration — Schweizer's conspiracy-inflected reading directly challenged by Ulloa.•       The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 — the Coolidge-era immigration law, backed by the KKK, that used national-origin quotas to bar Southern and Eastern European and Asian immigration.•       The El Paso Walmart massacre, August 3, 2019 — 23 people killed by a white supremacist who posted a manifesto echoing the “Great Replacement” theory.•       One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez — the magical-realist tradition Ulloa draws on.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:

The biggest tech news & social media trends on the internet from March 11th, 2026.Join our Patreon https://www.patreon.com/cw/CentennialWorld  Timestamps:0:42 Macbook Neo launches with Gen Z-focused social strategy7:49 Alleged AI influencer uses likeness of hiking/travel creator12:37 TechCrunch feuds with Cluely CEO Roy Lee18:11 Moltbook acquired by Meta 21:05 Anthropic sues US Department of WarSubscribe to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18cqrQI7gMiVfxIMRAeULF   Subscribe to Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/infinite-scroll/id1499785732   Subscribe to our weekly Substack: https://centennialworld.substack.com/   Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infinitescrollpodcast/   Follow our publication: https://www.tiktok.com/@centennialworld   Follow Lauren on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenmeisner_/   Follow Lauren on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@laurenmeisner_Please consider buying us a coffee to help keep Centennial World's weekly podcasts going! Every single dollar goes back into this business

“This is not the beginning of a new right-wing revanche fascist era; this is the end of something. But the problem is we can't get to the new world because the new world is too filled with problems.” — Jonathan TaplinTrump fantasizes about himself as a king. But he's actually just an interregnum, at least according to Jon Taplin — author of Move Fast and Break Things, Hollywood insider, and old friend. In a “terrifying” new piece in Rolling Stone, Taplin draws an unusual historical parallel: Trump as Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell cut off the king's head, slaughtered Catholics in Ireland (his Lebanon), tried to install his son as successor, and ended up with his head on a pike outside Parliament. MAGA is not the future, Taplin suggests. It's the Gramsci-style death rattle of something that was already dying.The real question is what's being born. Jon Taplin calls it the digital military-industrial complex — managed by Thiel, Musk, Andreessen, and a “real piece of work” drone entrepreneur unluckily named Palmer Luckey. In the Fifties, Eisenhower warned America about the dangers of a military industrial complex made up of 40 or 50 defense contractors. Now there are five, and — in Thielian Zero to One fashion — Silicon Valley wants to shrink them down to a techno-oligarchy.Today's Iranian war, Taplin says, is the sneak preview of this. In Iran, AI is now, so to speak, calling the ethical shots. Palantir's targeting system used old intelligence and identified a former military base. Thus the 175 dead children in a school next to a munitions factory. AI is only as good or evil as the information you feed it. Move fast and break things, Taplin appropriated Zuckerberg's dictum to describe Silicon Valley's impact on America. But Zuckerberg was only referring to domestic things — technology, society, democracy. Now it's the world.But there may be hope. Anthropic is resisting the administration. The midterms are coming. Republican unity is cracking. But there's also Taplin's Taco Tuesday (TTT) — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — especially, for some reason, on a Tuesday. Taplin predicts Trump will declare victory in Iran and withdraw. The alternative — invoking the Insurrection Act to cancel the midterms — would have sounded insane a year ago. But, of course, nothing sounds insane in our interregnum times. Cromwell's head ended up on a pike. Jon Taplin's Hollywood cronies are, no doubt, licking their lips in anticipation of history repeating itself. First as tragedy, then as farce. Five Takeaways•       Trump Is Cromwell, Not the Future: Taplin argues this is not the beginning of a permanent MAGA era but the end of something—an interregnum in Gramsci's sense. Cromwell ruled for eight years, tried to install his son, and ended up with his corpse dug up and his head on a pike. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, many morbid symptoms appear.•       The Digital Military-Industrial Complex Is More Dangerous Than Eisenhower's: Eisenhower warned about 40 or 50 defense contractors. Now there are five. Silicon Valley—Thiel, Musk, Andreessen, Luckey—wants to replace them. The US spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined. 59% of discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon. That money doesn't build bridges or fund colleges.•       AI Targeted a School and Killed 175 Children: AI is selecting targets in Iran. The system—Palantir's—used old intelligence and identified a former military base that had been a school for eight years. The children are dead. AI is only as good or evil as the information you feed it.•       Altman Threw Amodei Under the Bus: Sam Altman publicly supported Anthropic's position on surveillance and autonomous weapons on a Tuesday. By Friday he'd signed a deal with the Department of War. Classic Sam. Meanwhile the administration is trying to kill Anthropic by barring any government contractor from using Claude—a potential death sentence for a company built on enterprise clients.•       Taco Tuesday: Trump Always Chickens Out: Taplin predicts Trump will declare victory and withdraw—“Taco Tuesday,” where TACO stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The midterms are coming. Either the Democrats run the table, or Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to avoid electoral defeat. Nothing is insane with this president. About the GuestJonathan Taplin is Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the author of Move Fast and Break Things, The Magic Years, and The End of Reality. He was tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band and produced Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and The Band's The Last Waltz. He lives in Los Angeles.ReferencesReferences:•       Jonathan Taplin, “The Terrifying New Era of American Imperialism” — Rolling Stone•       Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin•       The End of Reality by Jonathan Taplin•       Eisenhower's farewell address (1961) and the original military-industrial complex warning•       Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear”•       The Last Supper (1993)—the Clinton-era consolidation of defense contractors from 25 to 5About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: Move fast and break the world ...

“Fidel Castro told his aides, ‘We're going to fill his arms with shit.' That is an example of weaponised migration. What we're experiencing now is on a thermonuclear scale.” — Peter SchweizerIs best selling writer Peter Schweizer a conspiracy theorist? He doesn't think so. His new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, argues that Mexico, China, and the Muslim Brotherhood are using mass migration as a strategic tool to undermine the United States. Not in a coordinated conspiracy—but as a confluence of interests, what he calls a “Venn diagram” of enemies who overlap on one point: transforming America through its borders.Rather than an axis of evil, then, we have a Venn diagram of foreign governments filling America with shitty immigrants. The world according to Peter Schweizer.Some of the claims are more credible than others. Mexico operates 53 consulates in the US—the UK has six. A dozen senior Mexican officials live full-time in the United States while serving in Mexico's parliament, and one of them crossed the country in 2025 to, in his own words, “organise the militancy” against the Trump administration. Chinese birth tourism, encouraged by the CCP, has produced an estimated million children born on US soil who are growing up in China—future voters, donors, and government employees. Hong Kong banned the practice in 2013, calling it subversion. And look at Hong Kong's predicament now.Other claims are harder to take seriously. The idea that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is a revanchist who wants to seize back California strikes me as Latin American magical realism—though Schweizer quotes Mexican officials saying exactly that. And the “Muslim Brotherhood” (whatever that is), which isn't in power anywhere, is no more of a threat to the United States than the Ottoman Empire. I pushed him on whether all immigrants are Manchurian candidates. He says no—but Schweizer's Invisible Coup could easily be confused with silly script for a paranoid Hollywood fantasy.There is, of course, a bit of an irony here. Schweizer's own parents were immigrants—his father Swiss, his mother Swedish. He grew up outside Seattle. His mother warned him, as a young man, about the terrible dangers of Swedish socialism. He favours “some legal immigration”—and sounds almost surprised at his liberal self for saying so. The American dream, he insists, is not dead. It's just being exploited by foreign powers who see America's open borders as a strategic vulnerability. Castro's Mariel boatlift is the model that Claudia Sheinbaum and the Moslem Brotherhood are trying to emulate. Pass the popcorn. Five Takeaways•       Immigration Has Been Weaponised: Schweizer argues that Mexico, China, and the Muslim Brotherhood are using mass migration as a strategic tool to undermine the United States. Not in a single conspiracy—but as a confluence of interests, a Venn diagram of enemies who overlap on one point: transforming America through its borders.•       Mexico Has 53 Consulates in the US. The UK Has Six: Schweizer's most striking claim: a dozen senior Mexican officials now live full-time in the US, serving in Mexico's parliament, organising what one of them calls “the militancy” against the Trump administration. Mexican consulates have met with Democratic activists to discuss how to flip states from red to blue.•       A Million US Citizens Are Being Raised in China: Chinese birth tourism, encouraged by the CCP, has produced an estimated million children born on US soil who are growing up in China. When they turn 18, they can vote, donate to candidates, and take government jobs. Hong Kong banned the practice in 2013, calling it subversion.•       The Son of Immigrants Who Fears Immigration: Schweizer's own parents were immigrants—his father Swiss, his mother Swedish. He grew up outside Seattle. His mother warned him about Swedish socialism. He favours “some legal immigration” but wants the weaponised networks dismantled first. The irony is not lost.•       The American Dream Is Not Dead—It's Being Exploited: Schweizer insists he's not arguing against immigration itself. The dream survives, he says, but it's being exploited by foreign powers who see America's open borders as a strategic vulnerability. Castro's Mariel boatlift was the template. What's happening now, he says, is the same thing on a thermonuclear scale. About the GuestPeter Schweizer is president of the Government Accountability Institute and a former fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Coup, Red-Handed, Blood Money, and Clinton Cash. He received his M.Phil. from Oxford University. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.ReferencesBooks and references:•       Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win by Peter Schweizer•       Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans by Peter Schweizer•       The Mariel boatlift of 1980—Fidel Castro's template for weaponised immigration•       The Manchurian Candidate — referenced in the conversation•       China's National Intelligence Law (2017)—requiring any Chinese national to perform intelligence duties when askedAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: Is Peter Schweizer a conspiracy theorist? (02:37) - The cover: Sheinbaum, Xi, AOC, Obama, Biden (04:57) - Good immigrants and bad immigrants (05:51) - The Mariel boatlift as template: Castro's “fill his arms with shit” (08:24...

Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder at Stage 2 Capital, the first venture fund supported by over 1,000 top sales and marketing executives. Stage 2 has invested in more than 100 startups, helping founders with proven revenue growth strategies and experienced go-to-market leaders to accelerate their growth. He has also been a member of the teaching faculty at Harvard Business School for over a decade, designing and leading courses on sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship, mentoring thousands of student entrepreneurs, and engaging deeply with the challenges of early-stage growth. Before these roles, Mark was the fourth employee and founding CRO at HubSpot, where he built and scaled the go-to-market organization from zero revenue to a successful IPO, pioneering a data-driven, buyer-centric sales model that has since influenced go-to-market teams worldwide. Mark holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an undergraduate engineering degree from Lehigh University. He is the author of the bestselling books The Sales Acceleration Formula and The Science of Scaling, which distill decades of experience into a practical, data-driven roadmap for founders, executives, and investors striving to achieve sustainable, scalable growth. Mark has been featured in popular publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Boston Globe, TechCrunch, and Harvard Business Review, delivered keynotes at major conferences including South by Southwest, SaaStr, Inbound, and the World Business Forum, and guest lectured at leading institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. Connect with Mark Roberge:Website: http://scienceofscaling.io/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ Twitter: https://x.com/markroberge Instagram: www.instagram.com/roberge_markYouTube: www.youtube.com/hashtag/markroberge TurnKey Podcast Productions Important Links:Guest to Gold Video Series: www.TurnkeyPodcast.com/gold The Ultimate Podcast Launch Formula- www.TurnkeyPodcast.com/UPLFplusFREE workshop on how to "Be A Great Guest."Free E-Book 5 Ways to Make Money Podcasting at www.Turnkeypodcast.com/gift Ready to earn 6-figures with your podcast? See if you've got what it takes at TurnkeyPodcast.com/quizSales Training for Podcasters: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sales-training-for-podcasters/id1540644376Nice Guys on Business: http://www.niceguysonbusiness.com/subscribe/The Turnkey Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/turnkey-podcast/id1485077152

“I have always said that they are the same person. And the drama of this story is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America, and the other in the White House.” — Michael WolffA few days ago we had Jason Pack on the show suggesting that the Anglo-American media elite had a degree of complicity in the Epstein scandal. Michael Wolff disagrees. The media weren't complicit, he says. They were just dumb. They found the story unseemly, were uncomfortable with it, and avoided it out of disdain—not conspiracy. David Remnick of The New Yorker was “dismissive of the whole thing.” The word Wolff keeps coming back to is “ick.”Wolff knew Epstein. He recorded an estimated hundred hours of interviews with him. He has tried repeatedly to sell an Epstein book. Every publisher passed—the last time as recently as autumn 2025. One cited “the ick factor.” Others feared a Trump lawsuit. The man who made fortunes for publishers with Fire and Fury couldn't get a deal on the story he knows best. If you want the closest thing to a firsthand account, Wolff says, read “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein” in his collection Too Famous. He's probably right.What emerges from the conversation is a portrait of Epstein as a middleman in a city of middlemen—but one who was genuinely interested in the people he connected, which is rare in that world. His sexual depravity was at war with his ambition to be respectable. The blackmail theory? “Certainly not true,” Wolff says. People came because they liked being there. He was their friend. And then there's Trump. Wolff's most explosive claim is that they are the same person—the closest relationship both men had in life was with each other. The drama is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America and the other in the White House. It's Gatsby without the romance. And that's what makes them both so vile.As for the Trump show, Wolff has given up predicting its end. It doesn't end until Trump dies. He is sui generis—nobody will replace him. He doesn't understand legacy, doesn't care about it, and when it's no longer about him, could give a fuck. We'll be trying to figure out how this happened for the next hundred years. Five Takeaways•       The Media Didn't Conspire—They Were Just Dumb: Wolff dismisses the idea that the Anglo-American media elite knew more about Epstein than they were letting on. They didn't know anything, he says. They found the story unseemly, were uncomfortable with it, and avoided it out of disdain—not conspiracy. David Remnick of The New Yorker was “dismissive of the whole thing.”•       No Publisher Would Touch the Epstein Book: Wolff has tried repeatedly to sell an Epstein book. Every publisher passed. One cited “the ick factor.” Others feared a Trump lawsuit. The last attempt was autumn 2025. The man who made fortunes publishing Fire and Fury couldn't get a deal on the story he knows best. The publishing industry's failure of nerve, Wolff says, is total.•       Trump and Epstein Are the Same Person: Wolff's most explosive claim: Trump and Epstein are the same person. The closest relationship both men had in life was with each other. The drama of the story is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America and the other in the White House. Gatsby without the romance.•       Epstein Was a Middleman in a City of Middlemen: What made Epstein different wasn't the blackmail—Wolff says that's “certainly not true.” People came because they liked being there. Epstein was genuinely interested in the people he connected, which is rare among New York's professional middlemen. His sexual depravity was at war with his ambition to be respectable.•       The Trump Show Doesn't End Until He Dies: Wolff has been predicting the end of Trump for years. He now concedes it probably doesn't end until Trump departs “this veil of tears.” Trump is sui generis—no one will replace him. He doesn't care about legacy. He doesn't even understand the concept. When it's no longer about him, he could give a fuck. About the GuestMichael Wolff is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and the author of Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide, All or Nothing, and Too Famous. He has been a columnist for Vanity Fair, New York, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Guardian. He lives in Manhattan.ReferencesBooks and references:•       Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned by Michael Wolff — contains “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein”•       Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff•       Previous Keen On episode: Jason Pack on the Epstein files and media complicity•       The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — referenced throughout as the model for Epstein, “but without the romance”About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:41) - Introduction: The media elite and Epstein (02:16) - The media didn't conspire—they were just dumb (04:18) - Wolff knew Epstein: why the story fascinated him (05:15) - No publisher would touch the book—“the ick factor” (08:21) - The Trump problem: fear of being sued (08:34) - What's the story? A middleman in a city of middlemen (10:01) - What Epstein was actually like (12:00) - “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein”: the best thing written about him (15:40) - Epstein as one of the elites—or the man who fed off them (16:29) - Trump and Epstein: the same person (17:49) - Gatsby without the romance (20:53) - The publishing industry's f...

“The fatal error is ours. Legislators set out a regulatory regime that keeps regulation at bay. The only other industry with a similar protection is the gun industry.” — Olivier SylvainThere are certain words in book titles that provoke. “Reclaiming”, for example. My guest today is happy to defend the provocation. Fordham law professor and former FTC senior advisor Olivier Sylvain argues in his new book, Reclaiming the Internet, that the internet was never really ours to begin with—and that the story about user control, free speech, and digital democratisation was always more nostalgia than reality.But Sylvain's argument in Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back is not the usual big-tech-is-bad narrative (yawn). He doesn't blame the companies. He blames us—or rather, Congress. The fatal error, he says, was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, which created a blanket immunity from liability for companies trafficking in user-generated content. The only other industry with comparable legal protection, he says, is the gun industry. That immunity enabled the attention economy's business model. Infinite scrolling = infinite advertising = infinite profit.What follows from that error is now everywhere: autoplay, algorithmic recommendation—design features engineered to hold your attention, not to facilitate free speech. Sylvain insists these companies aren't really platforms. They are, instead, services delivering content pursuant to their bottom line. And now the same Nineties playbook—innovation, user control, free speech—is being replayed with AI. Companies are deploying chatbots before they're ready, racing each other to market. A young man killed himself after a Gemini chatbot told him to and Google invoked the First Amendment in its defence.The fix, Sylvain argues, is not to abolish Section 230 but to attend to the business model itself: data minimisation, purpose limitations, and the kind of product-safety regulation that every other industry—from automobiles to toys to food—already accepts. I should disclose that my wife runs litigation at Google, so I'm all too familiar with the counter argument. But Sylvain makes a persuasive case even if his reclamation project is still a little too Rousseauean for my Hobbesian taste. Five Takeaways•       The Fatal Error Was Ours, Not Theirs: Sylvain doesn't blame big tech. He blames us—or rather, Congress. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act created a blanket immunity from liability for user-generated content. The only other industry with comparable protection is the gun industry. That legal shield became the business model.•       These Are Not Platforms: The word “platform” implies a neutral conduit connecting users. Sylvain says that's wrong. These are companies engineering your experience—infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation—to hold your attention and serve their bottom line. The free speech story is cover for a commercial design.•       The Same Mistake Is Happening with AI: The nineties playbook—innovation, user control, free speech—is being replayed with AI. Companies are deploying chatbots before they're ready, racing each other to market. Internal documents show they knew the dangers. A young man committed suicide after Gemini told him to. Google invoked the First Amendment in its defence.•       Data Protection Is the Real Fix: Sylvain argues for data minimisation and purpose limitations—rules that would only allow companies to collect information consistent with the purposes a consumer signed up for. Not to monetise it for opaque reasons. That would dampen the incentive to engineer addiction without touching free speech.•       There's a Bipartisan Consensus—but Only for Children: Something is shifting. Courts are rejecting Section 230 defences. Legislators on both sides agree something must be done. But the consensus only extends to protecting children. Sylvain thinks that's a mistake: a 36-year-old man just killed himself after talking to a chatbot. Adults are vulnerable too. About the GuestOlivier Sylvain is a professor of law at Fordham University, a former senior advisor to the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and a Senior Policy Research Fellow at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute. His new book is Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back (Columbia Global Reports).ReferencesReferences and previous Keen On episodes:•       Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) and its evolution into blanket immunity for tech companies•       Gonzales v. Google (2023)—the Supreme Court case that declined to rule on Section 230 but allowed the merits to proceed•       The Character AI / Gemini chatbot suicide cases—ongoing litigation against Google•       Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism — previous Keen On episode•       Julia Angwin, Zephyr Teachout, and Stewart Brand—referenced in the conversationAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: What does “reclaiming” the Internet mean? (03:06) - The layered stack: pipes, platforms, and consumer-facing apps (06:01) - Was user control ever real? The ideology of the nineties (09:32) - The fatal error: Section 230 and blanket immunity (14:51) - Facebook as punching bag—and why Sylvain doesn't blame the companies (17:31) - Addiction, self-harm, and the design features that hold your attention (22:00) - The attention economy and the Gonzales v. Google case (26:35) - How we can take it back: data minimization and purpose limitations (29:02) - “These are not platforms” (31:21) - Europe, the First Amendment, and the right to be forgotten (33:06) - AI business ...

“They're both naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the absence of clarity to their own advantage. Neither one of them is an authoritative leader of opinion with the interests of everyone at heart.” — Keith TeareWhat a difference a week makes. Last Saturday, Keith Teare was arguing that Anthropic was wrong to push back against the US government's use of AI in warfare. This week his editorial is entitled “No Good Guys.” He's used AI to put images of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegseth around the same table—and found all three guilty of poor leadership. According to Keith, Amodei is “ideologically” (whatever that means) driven. Altman is commercially driven and Hegseth is just following orders. None of them is asking the all-important questions about AI policy. And the man who should be—Trump's AI czar David Sacks—is absent-without-leave. All four should be court martialed.Yes, a lot has happened in seven days. Altman publicly supported Amodei's position on surveillance and autonomous weapons—then pulled a classic Sam u-turn and signed a contract with the Department of War. Amodei's internal memo was leaked to The Information, revealing that he'd interpreted the government's “no unlawful use” language as meaning there is no law. And the US military used Claude in the Iran war anyway. As Keith puts it: they're all naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the gaps to their own self-advantage.The only problem, of course, is that this isn't a playground game. And that these men are all shaping the lives (and deaths) of countless people around the world.Meanwhile, Om Malik's “Post of the Week” offers a devastating contrast between Xi's China and Trump's America. China, Om argues, has published a five-year AI plan built on open-source software and bottom-up adoption. America, in contrast, has AI theater. No strategy, no policy, no leadership—just contracts, leaks, and perpetual spin. Then there's the Startup of the Week, Jobright, which hit $5 million in annual revenue with nine people, suggesting that the companies of the future may not need humans at all. Keith's own SignalRank has four people and claims to be going public. We seem to be heading for post-human companies before we've figured out who's managing the humans.Maybe we should court martial everyone. What a difference a week makes. Five Takeaways•       No Good Guys: Keith Teare's editorial puts Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegseth in the same room—and finds all three guilty of bad leadership. Amodei is ideologically driven, Altman is commercially driven, and Hegseth is just doing his job. None of them is asking the big questions about AI policy. The real culprit may be the invisible AI czar, David Sacks.•       Altman Said One Thing, Then Did Another: Last week Altman publicly supported Amodei's position on surveillance and autonomous weapons. This week he signed a contract with the Department of War. The contract uses “no unlawful use” language—which, as Amodei's leaked memo points out, effectively means there is no law.•       The US Used Claude in Iran Anyway: Despite the very public dispute between Anthropic and the government, the US military used Claude in the Iran operation. The government doesn't need your permission to use your product. It just needs an API key and a credit card.•       China Has a Plan. America Has Theater: Om Malik's “Post of the Week” contrasts China's published five-year AI strategy—built on open-source software and bottom-up adoption—with America's complete absence of AI policy. The Chinese approach is more inclusive and practical than anything coming out of Washington or Silicon Valley.•       The Future Company Has Nine Employees: Startup of the week Jobright hit $5 million in annual recurring revenue with just nine people. Keith's own company, SignalRank, has four people and is going public. The implication: the companies of the future will be run mostly by software agents, not humans. We're heading for post-human companies. About the GuestKeith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, founder and CEO of SignalRank, and a recurring sparring partner on Keen On America. A serial entrepreneur and investor, he is the co-founder of TechCrunch and RealNames. He joins the show every Saturday for the weekly tech roundup.ReferencesEssays, posts, and interviews referenced:•       Keith Teare, “No Good Guys” — That Was The Week editorial•       Om Malik, “The Great AI Game versus AI Theater” — Post of the Week•       Ross Douthat, “If AI Is a Weapon, Who Should Control It?” — New York Times•       Ben Thompson, Stratechery — on “no unlawful use” and the absence of international law•       Paul Krugman on the economics of technological change — technology, jobs, wages, and monopolies•       Tim O'Reilly, “How We Bet Against the Bitter Lesson” — skills and the future knowledge economy•       Yascha Mounk and Danielle Allen on participatory democracy and AI governance•       Previous Keen On episodes: Tom Wells on the Kissinger tapes; Michael Ellsberg on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers•       Startup of the Week: Jobright — $5M ARR with nine employeesAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: What a difference a week makes (01:14) - “No Good Guys”: Keith's editorial and Om Malik's wake-up call (02:30) - Amodei, Altman, Hegseth: three self-interested players (04:02) - How the Iran invasion changed the AI debate (05:28) - “No unlawful use”: a meaningless phrase in a lawless context (06:50) - The US used Claude in Iran despite the Anthropic dispute (08:15) - Naughty boys in the playground: spinning vs. leadership (09:31) - Bobby Kenn...

“All my life, I've absolutely opposed all terrorism by anyone under any circumstances. I define terrorism as the deliberate killing of noncombatants.” — Daniel Ellsberg, October 2001Last week we had Tom Wells on the show talking about Henry Kissinger's moral indifference to the loss of innocent lives in the Vietnam war. Henry Kissinger, of course, was no fan of the Pentagon Papers— the leaked documents that showed the American government was lying about Vietnam, thereby changing public opinion about the war and helping end it. And the Pentagon Papers are forever associated with one brave man: Daniel Ellsberg, Harvard economist, RAND Corporation strategist, marine, Pentagon insider—and America's most famous whistleblower.Ellsberg died in 2023 at the age of 92. Now his son Michael Ellsberg has co-edited a posthumous collection of his father's previously unpublished writing. Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope draws from a hundred boxes of handwritten notebooks in nearly illegible script, spanning fifty years of moral reckoning. Daniel Ellsberg didn't much care about publishing these notes. His son thought otherwise.What emerges is not another memoir of the Pentagon Papers but a book of ideas—about the nature of evil, the morality of obedience, and what Ellsberg called “civic courage”: taking nonviolent risks when your democracy is in danger. He was inspired not by intellectuals but by young draft resisters going to jail. Daniel Ellsberg's moral lineage ran from Thoreau through Gandhi to Martin Luther King. And his moral absolute was uncompromising: the deliberate killing of civilians is “terrorism”, whoever orders it. By that definition, Daniel Ellsberg defined Harry Truman as a terrorist. Not to mention morally indifferent politicians like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.Michael Ellsberg is candid about growing up in Berkeley with a father who was loving but distracted—a free-range parent who spent his evenings filling yellow legal pads rather than playing baseball. He's equally candid about what his father would be saying right now: that whatever rationale exists for the Iran war, there are official plans and reasoning that the American public should know about but doesn't. The Pentagon Papers proved the government lied. The question, as American bombs once again rain down on innocent civilians, is whether anything has changed in the last sixty years since “terrorists” like Henry Kissinger lied to the American public about Vietnam. Five Takeaways•       You Are Being Lied to More Than You Realise: That was Ellsberg's message in 1971, and his son says it's his message now. Whatever rationale Trump has for the Iran war, Michael Ellsberg argues, there are plans and reasoning the public should know about but doesn't. The Pentagon Papers proved the government lied about Vietnam. The question is whether anything has changed.•       The Establishment Man Who Became a Traitor: Daniel Ellsberg was Harvard-educated, a RAND Corporation strategist, a marine, a Pentagon aide working under McNamara. He was not a hippie. He was a silent-generation insider who watched the system lie about a war everyone inside knew was hopeless—and decided the public had a right to know.•       All Deliberate Killing of Civilians Is Terrorism: In an essay written in October 2001, Ellsberg proposed a moral absolute: the deliberate killing of noncombatants is terrorism, whoever does it—left or right, aggressor or defender, first world or third. By that definition, Hiroshima was terrorism and Truman was a terrorist. No lesser-evil exceptions.•       Civic Courage Is as Important as Military Courage: Ellsberg modelled what he called “civic courage”—taking nonviolent risks when democracy is in danger. He was inspired by draft resisters going to jail, not by intellectuals writing op-eds. The lineage runs from Thoreau through Gandhi to Martin Luther King. Ellsberg saw himself in that tradition.•       This Book Is a Son's Labour of Love: Daniel Ellsberg spent decades filling yellow legal pads in nearly illegible handwriting. He didn't much care about publication. His son Michael and longtime assistant Jan Thomas thought otherwise. Truth and Consequence draws from a hundred boxes of notebooks spanning fifty years—a book of ideas, not just a memoir of action. About the GuestMichael Ellsberg is the son of Daniel Ellsberg and the co-editor, with Jan R. Thomas, of Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope (Bloomsbury). He is the author of three previous books. He lives in Berkeley, California.ReferencesBooks and references mentioned:•       Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg•       The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg•       The Most Dangerous Man in America — Oscar-nominated documentary about Daniel Ellsberg•       The Ellsberg Paradox — Daniel Ellsberg's contribution to decision theory, still discussed in economics•       Previous Keen On episodes: Tom Wells on the Kissinger tapes; McNamara and his mental breakdown; Truman's decision to drop the bomb•       Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. — the civil disobedience lineage Ellsberg claimed as his ownAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: From the Kissinger tapes to the Pentagon Papers (03:37) - Why Daniel Ellsberg matters now (06:21) - The establishment man who became a whistleblower (09:16) - McNamara, RAND, and the stalemate nobody would admit (11:19) - Randy Keeler and the draft resisters who changed everything (12:17) - Gro...

The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startups and tweeting viral insights about the future of agents.Now that both Cursor, Cloudflare, Perplexity, Anthropic and more have made Filesystems and Sandboxes and various forms of “Just Give the Agent a Box” cool (not just cool; it is now one of the single hottest areas in AI infrastructure growing 100% MoM), we find it a delightfully appropriate time to do the episode with the OG CEO who has been giving humans and computers Boxes since he was a college dropout pitching VCs at a Michael Arrington house party.Enjoy our special pod, with fan favorite returning guest/guest cohost Jeff Huber!Note: We didn't directly discuss the AI vs SaaS debate - Aaron has done many, many, many other podcasts on that, and you should read his definitive essay on it. Most commentators do not understand SaaS businesses because they have never scaled one themselves, and deeply reflected on what the true value proposition of SaaS is.We also discuss Your Company is a Filesystem:We also shoutout CTO Ben Kus' and the AI team, who talked about the technical architecture and will return for AIE WF 2026.Full Video EpisodeTimestamps* 00:00 Adapting Work for Agents* 01:29 Why Every Agent Needs a Box* 04:38 Agent Governance and Identity* 11:28 Why Coding Agents Took Off First* 21:42 Context Engineering and Search Limits* 31:29 Inside Agent Evals* 33:23 Industries and Datasets* 35:22 Building the Agent Team* 38:50 Read Write Agent Workflows* 41:54 Docs Graphs and Founder Mode* 55:38 Token FOMO Culture* 56:31 Production Function Secrets* 01:01:08 Film Roots to Box* 01:03:38 AI Future of Movies* 01:06:47 Media DevRel and EngineeringTranscriptAdapting Work for AgentsAaron Levie: Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and does it for you, and you may be at best review it. That's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work.We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this ‘cause you'll see compounding returns. But that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We're back in the chroma studio with uh, chroma, CEO, Jeff Hoover. Welcome returning guest now guest host.Aaron Levie: It's a pleasure. Wow. How'd you get upgraded to, uh, to that?swyx: Because he's like the perfect guy to be guest those for you.Aaron Levie: That makes sense actually, for We love context. We, we both really love context le we really do.We really do.swyx: Uh, and we're here with, uh, Aaron Levy. Welcome.Aaron Levie: Thank you. Good to, uh, good to be [00:01:00] here.swyx: Uh, yeah. So we've all met offline and like chatted a little bit, but like, it's always nice to get these things in person and conversation. Yeah. You just started off with so much energy. You're, you're super excited about agents.I loveAaron Levie: agents.swyx: Yeah. Open claw. Just got by, got bought by OpenAI. No, not bought, but you know, you know what I mean?Aaron Levie: Some, some, you know, acquihire. Executiveswyx: hire.Aaron Levie: Executive hire. Okay. Executive hire. Say,swyx: hey, that's my term. Okay. Um, what are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.Why Every Agent Needs a BoxAaron Levie: Well, the thing that, that we get super excited by that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we've, we've built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their, their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing collaboration of those files.All of those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts, it might have your research materials, it might have marketing information, it might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. [00:02:00] But there's been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them, and they kind of go away and you don't really see them for a long time.And all of a sudden, uh, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of, of answers to new questions of data that will transform into, into something else that, that produces value in your organization. It, it contains the answer to the new employee that's onboarding, that needs to ramp up on a project.Um, it contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you're having a conversation to them, with them contains the roadmap information that's gonna produce the next feature. So all that data. That previously we've been just sort of storing and, and you know, occasionally forgetting about, ‘cause we're only working on the new active stuff.All of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise and it's gonna become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they're looking for and produce new, new [00:03:00] value and new data on that information. And it's gonna become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they're gonna need access to that data as well.And um, and you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of, of, of you and, and effectively as you as and, and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and, and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there's gonna be agents that are just.Effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and, and you're gonna collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, up updating everybody's, you know, views of this landscape version of, of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent.It's on its own system, it's on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don't give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it, it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manage that [00:04:00] enterprise data.We think it's gonna just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with, and we just have to make sure we're building the right platform to support that.swyx: The sort of shorthand I put it is as people build agents, everybody's just realizing that every agent needs a box. Yes.And it's nice to be called box and just give everyone a box.Aaron Levie: Hey, I if I, you know, if we can make that go viral, uh, like I, I think that that terminology, I, that's theswyx: tagline. Every agentAaron Levie: needs a box. Every agent needs a box. If we can make that the headline of this, I'm fine with this. And that's the billboard I wanna like Yeah, exactly.Every agent needs a box. Um, I like it. Can we ship this? Like,swyx: okay, let's do it. Yeah.Aaron Levie: Uh, my work here is done and I got the value I needed outta this podcast Drinks.swyx: Yeah.Agent Governance and IdentityAaron Levie: But, but, um, but, but, you know, so the thing that we, we kind of think about is, um, is, you know, whether you think the number 10 x or a hundred x or whatever the number is, we're gonna have some order of magnitude more agents than people.That's inevitable. It has to happen. So then the question is, what is the infrastructure that's needed to make all those agents effective in the enterprise? Make sure that they are well governed. Make sure they're only doing [00:05:00] safe things on your information. Make sure that they're not getting exposed. The data that they shouldn't have access to.There's gonna be just incredibly spectacularly crazy security incidents that will happen with agents because you'll prompt, inject an agent and sort of find your way through the CRM system and pull out data that you shouldn't have access to. Oh, weJeff Huber: have God,Aaron Levie: right? I mean, that's just gonna happen all over the place, right?So, so then the thing is, is how do you make sure you have the right security, the permissions, the access controls, the data governance. Um, we actually don't yet exactly know in many cases how we're gonna regulate some of these agents, right? If you think about an agent in financial services, does it have the exact same financial sort of, uh, requirements that a human did?Or is it, is the risk fully on the human that was interacting or created the agent? All open questions, but no matter what, there's gonna need to be a layer that manages the, the data they have access to, the workflows that they're involved in, pulling up data from multiple systems. This is the new infrastructure opportunity in the era of agents.swyx: You have a piece on agent identities, [00:06:00] which I think was today, um, which I think a lot of breaking news, the security, security people are talking about, right? Like you basically, I, I always think of this as like, well you need the human you and then there you need the agent. YouAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: And uh, well, I don't know if it's that simple, but is box going to have an opinion on that or you're just gonna be like, well we're just the sort of the, the source layer.Yeah. Let's Okta of zero handle that.Aaron Levie: I think we're gonna have an opinion and we will work with generally wherever the contours of the market end up. Um, and the reason that we're gonna have an opinion more than other topics probably is because one of the biggest use cases for why your agent might need it, an identity is for file system access.So thus we have to kind of think about this pretty deeply. And I think, uh, unless you're like in our world thinking about this particular problem all day long, it might be, you know, like, why is this such a big deal? And the reason why it's a really big deal is because sometimes sort of say, well just give the agent an, an account on the system and it just treats, treat it like every other type of user on the system.The [00:07:00] problem is, is that I as Aaron don't really have any responsibility over anybody else's box account in our organization. I can't see the box account of any other employee that I work with. I am not liable for anything that they do. And they have, I have, I have, you know, strict privacy requirements on everything that they're able to, you know, that, that, that they work on.Agents don't have that, you know, don't have those properties. The person who creates the agent probably is gonna, for the foreseeable future, take on a lot of the liability of what that agent does. That agent doesn't deserve any privacy because, because it's, you know, it can't fully be autonomously operated and it doesn't have any legal, you know, kind of, you know, responsibility.So thus you can't just be like, oh, well I'll just create a bunch of accounts and then I'll, I'll kind of work with that agent and I'll talk to it occasionally. Like you need oversight of that. And so then the question is, how do you have a world where the agent, sometimes you have oversight of, but what if that agent goes and works with other people?That person over there is collaborating with the agent on something you shouldn't have [00:08:00] access to what they're doing. So we have all of these new boundaries that we're gonna have to figure out of, of, you know, it's really, really easy. So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with ai, which is the agent just is you.And when you're in quad code and you're in cursor, and you're in Codex, you're just, the agent is you. You're offing into your services. It can do everything you can do. That's the easy mode. The hard mode is agents are kind of running on their own. People check in with them occasionally, they're doing things autonomously.How do you give them access to resources in the enterprise and not dramatically increased the security risk and the risk that you might expose the wrong thing to somebody. These are all the new problems that we have to get solved. I like the identity layer and, and identity vendors as being a solution to that, but we'll, we'll need some opinions as well because so many of the use cases are these collaborative file system use cases, which is how do I give it an agent, a subset of my data?Give it its own workspace as well. ‘cause it's gonna need to store off its own information that would be relevant for it. And how do I have the right oversight into that? [00:09:00]Jeff Huber: One thing, which, um, I think is kind interesting, think about is that you know, how humans work, right? Like I may not also just like give you access to the whole file.I might like sit next to you and like scroll to this like one part of the file and just show you that like one part and like, you know,swyx: partial file access.Jeff Huber: I'm just saying I think like our, like RA does seem to be dead, right? Like you wanna say something is dead uhhuh probably RA is dead. And uh, like the auth story to me seems like incredibly unsolved and unaddressed by like the existing state of like AI vendors.ButAaron Levie: yeah, I think, um, we're, I mean you're taking obviously really to level limit that we probably need to solve for. Yeah. And we built an access control system that was, was kind of like, you know, its own little world for, for a long time. And um, and the idea was this, it's a many to many collaboration system where I can give you any part of the file system.And it's a waterfall model. So if I give you higher up in the, in the, in the system, you get everything below. And that, that kind of created immense flexibility because I can kind of point you to any layer in the, in the tree, but then you're gonna get access to everything kind of below it. And that [00:10:00] mostly is, is working in this, in this world.But you do have to manage this issue, which is how do I create an agent that has access to some of my stuff and somebody else's stuff as well. Mm-hmm. And which parts do I get to look at as the creator of the agent? And, and these are just brand new problems? Yeah. Crazy. And humans, when there was a human there that was really easy to do.Like, like if the three of us were all sharing, there'd be a Venn diagram where we'd have an overlapping set of things we've shared, but then we'd have our own ways that we shared with each other. In an agent world, somebody needs to take responsibility for what that agent has access to and what they're working on.These are like the, some of the most probably, you know, boring problems for 98% of people on, on the internet, but they will be the problems that are the difference between can you actually have autonomous agents in an enterprise contextswyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: That are not leaking your data constantly.swyx: No. Like, I mean, you know, I run a very, very small company for my conference and like we already have data sensitivity issues.Yes. And some of my team members cannot see Yes. Uh, the others and like, I can't imagine what it's like to run a Fortune 500 and like, you have to [00:11:00] worry about this. I'm just kinda curious, like you, you talked to a lot like, like 70, 80% of your cus uh, of the Fortune 500, your customers.Aaron Levie: Yep. 67%. Just so we're being verySEswyx: precise.So Yeah. I'm notAaron Levie: Okay. Okay.swyx: Something I'm rounding up. Yes. Round up. I'm projecting to, forAaron Levie: the government.swyx: I'm projecting to the end of the year.Aaron Levie: Okay.swyx: There you go.Aaron Levie: You do make it sound like, like we, we, well we've gotta be on this. Like we're, we're taking way too long to get to 80%. Well,swyx: no, I mean, so like. How are they approaching it?Right? Because you're, you don't have a, you don't have a final answer yet.Why Coding Agents Took Off FirstAaron Levie: Well, okay, so, so this is actually, this is the stark reality that like, unfortunately is the kinda like pouring the water on the party a little bit.swyx: Yes.Aaron Levie: We all in Silicon Valley are like, have the absolute best conditions possible for AI ever.And I think we all saw the dke, you know, kind of Dario podcast and this idea of AI coding. Why is that taken off? And, and we're not yet fully seeing it everywhere else. Well, look, if you just like enumerated the list of properties that AI coding has and then compared it to other [00:12:00] knowledge work, let's just, let's just go through a few of them.Generally speaking, you bring on a new engineer, they have access to a large swath of the code base. Like, there's like very, like you, just, like new engineer comes on, they can just go and find the, the, the stuff that they, they need to work with. It's a fully text in text out. Medium. It's only, it's just gonna be text at the end of the day.So it's like really great from a, from just a, uh, you know, kinda what the agent can work with. Obviously the models are super trained on that dataset. The labs themselves have a really strong, kind of self-reinforcing positive flywheel of why they need to do, you know, agent coding deeply. So then you get just better tooling, better services.The actual developers of the AI are daily users of the, of the thing that they're we're working on versus like the, you know, probably there's only like seven Claude Cowork legal plugin users at Anthropic any given day, but there's like a couple thousand Claude code and you know, users every single day.So just like, think about which one are they getting more feedback on. All day long. So you just go through this list. You have a, you know, everybody who's a [00:13:00] developer by definition is technical so they can go install the latest thing. We're all generally online, or at least, you know, kinda the weird ones are, and we're all talking to each other, sharing best practices, like that's like already eight differences.Versus the rest of the economy. Every other part of the economy has like, like six to seven headwinds relative to that list. You go into a company, you're a banker in financial services, you have access to like a, a tiny little subset of the total data that's gonna be relevant to do your job. And you're have to start to go and talk to a bunch of people to get the right data to do your job because Sally didn't add you to that deal room, you know, folder.And that that, you know, the information is actually in a completely different organization that you now have to go in and, and sort of run into. And it's like you have this endless list of access controls and security. As, as you talked about, you have a medium, which is not, it's not just text, right? You have, you have a zoom call that, that you're getting all of the requirements from the customer.You have a lot of in-person conversations and you're doing in-person sales and like how do you ever [00:14:00] digitize all of that information? Um, you know, I think a lot of people got upset with this idea that the code base has all the context, um, that I don't know if you follow, you know, did you follow some of that conversation that that went viral?Is like, you know, it's not that simple that, that the code base doesn't have all the knowledge, but like it's a lot, you're a lot better off than you are with other areas of knowledge work. Like you, we like, we like have documentation practices, you write specifications. Those things don't exist for like 80% of work that happens in the enterprise.That's the divide that we have, which is, which is AI coding has, has just fully, you know, where we've reached escape velocity of how powerful this stuff is, and then we're gonna have to find a way to bring that same energy and momentum, but to all these other areas of knowledge work. Where the tools aren't there, the data's not set up to be there.The access controls don't make it that easy. The context engineering is an incredibly hard problem because again, you have access control challenges, you have different data formats. You have end users that are gonna need to kind of be kind of trained through this as opposed to their adopting [00:15:00] these tools in their free time.That's where the Fortune 500 is. And so we, I think, you know, have to be prepared as an industry where we are gonna be on a multi-year march to, to be able to bring agents to the enterprise for these workflows. And I think probably the, the thing that we've learned most in coding that, that the rest of the world is not yet, I think ready for, I mean, we're, they'll, they'll have to be ready for it because it's just gonna inevitably happen is I think in coding.What, what's interesting is if you think about the practice of coding today versus two years ago. It's probably the most changed workflow in maybe the history of time from the amount of time it's changed, right? Yeah. Like, like has any, has any workflow in the entire economy changed that quickly in terms of the amount of change?I just, you know, at least in any knowledge worker workflow, there's like very rarely been an event where one piece of technology and work practice has so fundamentally, you know, changed, changed what you do. Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and [00:16:00] does it for you, and you may be at best review it.And even that's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work. We basically adapted to how the agent works. Mm-hmm. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution.The rest of the economy is gonna have to update its workflows to make agents effective. And to give agents the context that they need and to actually figure out what kind of prompting works and to figure out how do you ensure that the agent has the right access to information to be able to execute on its work.I, you know, this is not the panacea that people were hoping for, of the agent drops in, just automates your life. Like you have to basically re-engineer your workflow to get the most out of agents and, uh, and that, that's just gonna take, you know, multiple years across the economy. Right now it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this.‘cause [00:17:00] you'll see compounding returns, but that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: I love, I love pushing back. I think that. That is what a lot of technology consultants love to hear this sort of thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. First to, to embrace the ai. Yes. To get to the promised land, you must pay me so much money to a hundred percent to adopt the prescribed way of, uh, conforming to the agents.Yes. And I worry that you will be eclipsed by someone else who says, no, come as you are.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And we'll meet you where you are.Aaron Levie: And, and, and and what was the thing that went viral a week ago? OpenAI probably, uh, is hiring F Dees. Yeah. Uh, to go into the enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. And then philanthropic is embedded at Goldman Sachs.Yeah. So if the labs are having to do this, if, if the labs have decided that they need to hire FDE and professional services, then I think that's a pretty clear indication that this, there's no easy mode of workflow transformation. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to your point, I think actually this is a market opportunity for, you know, new professional services and consulting [00:18:00] firms that are like Agent Build and they, and they kind of, you know, go into organizations and they figure out how to re-engineer your workflows to make them more agent ready and get your data into the right format and, you know, reconstruct your business process.So you're, you're not doing most of the work. You're telling agents how to do the work and then you're reviewing it. But I haven't seen the thing that can just drop in and, and kinda let you not go through those changes.swyx: I don't know how that kind of sales pitch goes over. Yeah. You know, you're, you're saying things like, well, in my sort of nice beautiful walled garden, here's, there's, uh, because here's this, here's this beautiful box account that has everything.Yes. And I'm like, well, most, most real life is extremely messy. Sure. And like, poorly named and there duplicate this outdated s**tAaron Levie: a hundred percent. And so No, no, a hundred percent. And so this is actually No. So, so this is, I mean, we agree that, that getting to the beautiful garden is gonna be tough.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: There's also the other end of the spectrum where I, I just like, it's a technical impossibility to solve. The agent is, is truly cannot get enough context to make the right decision in, in the, in the incredibly messy land. Like there's [00:19:00] no a GI that will solve that. So, so we're gonna have to kind of land in somewhere in between, which is like we all collectively get better at.Documentation practices and, and having authoritative relatively up-to-date information and putting it in the right place like agents will, will certainly cause us to be much better organized around how we work with our information, simply because the severity of the agent pulling the wrong data will be too high and the productivity gain of that you'll miss out on by not doing this will be too high as well, that you, that your competition will just do it and they'll just have higher velocity.So, uh, and, and we, we see this a lot firsthand. So we, we build a series of agents internally that they can kind of have access to your full box account and go off and you give it a task and it can go find whatever information you're looking for and work with. And, you know, thank God for the model progress, but like, if, if you gave that task to an agent.Nine months ago, you're just gonna get lots of bogus answers because it's gonna, it's gonna say, Hey, here's, here are fi [00:20:00] five, you know, documents that all kind of smell like the right thing. And I'm gonna, but I, but you're, you're putting me on the clock. ‘cause my assistant prompt says like, you know, be pretty smart, but also try and respond to the user and it's gonna respond.And it's like, ah, it got the wrong document. And then you do that once or twice as a knowledge worker and you're just neverswyx: again,Aaron Levie: never again. You're just like done with the system.swyx: Yeah. It doesn't work.Aaron Levie: It doesn't work. And so, you know, Opus four six and Gemini three one Pro and you know, whatever the latest five 3G BT will be, like, those things are getting better and better and it's using better judgment.And this sort of like the, all of these updates to the agentic tool and search systems are, are, we're seeing, we're seeing very real progress where the agent. Kind of can, can almost smell some things a little bit fishy when it's getting, you know, we, we have this process where we, we have it go fan out, do a bunch of searches, pull up a bunch of data, and then it has to sort of do its own ranking of, you know, what are the right documents that, that it should be working with.And again, like, you know, the intelligence level of a model six months ago, [00:21:00] it'd be just throwing a dart at like, I'm just, I'm gonna grab these seven files and I, I pray, I hope that that's the right answer. And something like an opus first four five, and now four six is like, oh, it's like, no, that one doesn't seem right relative to this question because I'm seeing some signal that is making that, you know, that's contradicting the document where it would normally be in the tree and who should have access.Like it's doing all of that kind of work for you. But like, it still doesn't work if you just have a total wasteland of data. Like, it's just not, it's just not possible. Partly ‘cause a human wouldn't even be able to do it. So basically if a, if a really, really smart human. Could not do that task in five or 10 minutes for a search retrieval type task.Look, you know, your agent's not gonna be able to do it any better. You see this all day long. SoContext Engineering and Search Limitsswyx: this touches on a thing that just passionate about it was just context engineering. I, I'm just gonna let you ramble or riff on, on context engineering. If, if, if there's anything like he, he did really good work on context fraud, which has really taken over as like the term that people use and the referenceAaron Levie: a hundred percent.We, we all we think about is, is the context rob problem. [00:22:00]Jeff Huber: Yeah, there's certainly a lot of like ranking considerations. Gentech surgery think is incredibly promising. Um, yeah, I was trying to generate a question though. I think I have a question right now. Swyx.Aaron Levie: Yeah, no, but like, like I think there was this moment, um, you know, like, I don't know, two years ago before, before we knew like where the, the gotchas were gonna be in ai and I think someone was like, was like, well, infinite context windows will just solve all of these problems and ‘cause you'll just, you'll just give the context window like all the data and.It's just like, okay, I mean, maybe in 2035, like this is a viable solution. First of all, it, it would just, it would just simply cost too much. Like we just can't give the model like the 5,000 documents that might be relevant and it's gonna read them all. And I've seen enough to, to start believing in crazy stuff.So like, I'm willing to just say, sure. Like in, in 10 years from now,swyx: never say, never, never.Aaron Levie: In, in 10 years from now, we'll have infinite context windows at, at a thousandth of the price of today. Like, let's just like believe that that's possible, but Right. We're in reality today. So today we have a context engineering [00:23:00] problem, which is, I got, I got, you know, 200,000 tokens that I can work with, or prob, I don't even know what the latest graph is before, like massive degradation.16. Okay. I have 60,000 tokens that I get to work with where I'm gonna get accurate information. That's not a lot of tokens for a corpus of 10 million documents that a knowledge worker might have across all of the teams and all the projects and all the people they work with. I have, I have 10 million documents.Which, you know, maybe is times five pages per document or something like that. I'm at 50 million pages of information and I have 60,000 tokens. Like, holy s**t. Yeah. This is like, how do I bridge the 50 million pages of information with, you know, the couple hundred that I get to work with in that, in that token window.Yeah. This is like, this is like such an interesting problem and that's why actually so much work is actually like, just like search systems and the databases and that layer has to just get so locked in, but models getting better and importantly [00:24:00] knowing when they've done a search, they found the wrong thing, they go back, they check their work, they, they find a way to balance sort of appeasing the user versus double checking.We have this one, we have this one test case where we ask the agent to go find. 10 pieces of information.swyx: Is this the complex work eval?Aaron Levie: Uh, this is actually not in the eval. This is, this is sort of just like we have a bunch of different, we have a bunch of internal benchmark kind of scenarios. Every time we, we update our agent, we have one, which is, I ask it to find all of our office addresses, and I give it the list of 10 offices that we have.And there's not one document that has this, maybe there should be, that would be a great example of the kind of thing that like maybe over time companies start to, you know, have these sort of like, what are the canonical, you know, kind of key areas of knowledge that we need to have. We don't seem to have this one document that says, here are all of our offices.We have a bunch of documents that have like, here's the New York office and whatever. So you task this agent and you, you get, you say, I need the addresses for these 10 offices. Okay. And by the way, if you do this on any, you know, [00:25:00] public chat model, the same outcome is gonna happen. But for a different kind of query, you give it, you say, I need these 10 addresses.How many times should the agent go and do its search before it decides whether or not, there's just no answer to this question. Often, and especially the, the, let's say lower tier models, it'll come back and it'll give you six of the 10 addresses. And it'll, and I'll just say I couldn't find the otherswyx: four.It, it doesn't know what It doesn't know. ItAaron Levie: doesn't know what It doesn't know. Yeah. So the model is just like, like when should it stop? When should it stop doing? Like should it, should it do that task for literally an hour and just keep cranking through? Maybe I actually made up an office location and it doesn't know that I made it up and I didn't even know that I made it up.Like, should it just keep, re should it read every single file in your entire box account until it, until it should exhaust every single piece of information.swyx: Expensive.Aaron Levie: These are the new problems that we have. So, you know, something like, let's say a new opus model is sort of like, okay, I'm gonna try these types of queries.I didn't get exactly what I wanted. I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna, at [00:26:00] some point I'm gonna stop searching. ‘cause I've determined that that no amount of searching is gonna solve this problem. I'm just not able to do it. And that judgment is like a really new thing that the model needs to be able to have.It's like, when should it give up on a task? ‘cause, ‘cause you just don't, it's a can't find the thing. That's the real world of knowledge, work problems. And this is the stuff that the coding agents don't have to deal with. Because they, it just doesn't like, like you're not usually asking it about, you're, you're always creating net new information coming right outta the model for the most part.Obviously it has to know about your code base and your specs and your documentation, but, but when you deploy an agent on all of your data that now you have all of these new problems that you're dealing withJeff Huber: our, uh, follow follow-up research to context ride is actually on a genetic search. Ah. Um, and we've like right, sort of stress tested like frontier models and their ability to search.Um, and they're not actually that good at searching. Right. Uh, so you're sort of highlighting this like explore, exploit.swyx: You're just say, Debbie, Donna say everything doesn't work. Like,Aaron Levie: well,Jeff Huber: somebody has to be,Aaron Levie: um, can I just throw out one more thing? Yeah. That is different from coding and, and the rest [00:27:00] of the knowledge work that I, I failed to mention.So one other kind of key point is, is that, you know, at the end of the day. Whether you believe we're in a slop apocalypse or, or whatever. At the end of the day, if you, if you build a working product at the end of, if you, if you've built a working solution that is ultimately what the customer is paying for, like whether I have a lot of slop, a little slop or whatever, I'm sure there's lots of code bases we could go into in enterprise software companies where it's like just crazy slop that humans did over a 20 year period, but the end customer just gets this little interface.They can, they can type into it, it does its thing. Knowledge work, uh, doesn't have that property. If I have an AI model, go generate a contract and I generate a contract 20 times and, you know, all 20 times it's just 3% different and like that I, that, that kind of lop introduces all new kinds of risk for my organization that the code version of that LOP didn't, didn't introduce.These are, and so like, so how do you constrain these models to just the part that you want [00:28:00] them to work on and just do the thing that you want them to do? And, and, you know, in engineering, we don't, you can't be disbarred as an engineer, but you could be disbarred as a lawyer. Like you can do the wrong medical thing In healthcare, you, there's no, there's no equivalent to that of engineering.Like, doswyx: you want there to be, because I've considered softwareJeff Huber: engineer. What's that? Civil engineering there is, right? NotAaron Levie: software civil engineer. Sure. Oh yeah, for sure. But like in any of our companies, you like, you know, you'll be forgiven if you took down the site and, and we, we will do a rollback and you'll, you'll be in a meeting, but you have not been disbarred as an engineer.We don't, we don't change your, you know, your computer science, uh, blameJeff Huber: degree, this postmortem.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so, uh, now maybe we collectively as an industry need to figure out like, what are you liable for? Not legally, but like in a, in a management sense, uh, of these agents. All sorts of interesting problems that, that, that, uh, that have to come out.But in knowledge work, that's the real hostile environments that we're operating in. Hmm.swyx: I do think like, uh, a lot of the last year's, 2025 story was the rise of coding agents and I think [00:29:00] 2026 story is definitely knowledge work agents. Yes. A hundredAaron Levie: percent.swyx: Right. Like that would, and I think open claw core work are just the beginning.Yes. Like it's, the next one's gonna just gonna be absolute craziness.Aaron Levie: It it is. And, and, uh, and it's gonna be, I mean, again, like this is gonna be this, this wave where we, we are gonna try and bring as many of the practices from coding because that, that will clearly be the forefront, which is tell an agent to go do something and has an access to a set of resources.You need to be responsible for reviewing it at the end of the process. That to me is the, is the kind of template that I just think goes across knowledge, work and odd. Cowork is a great example. Open Closet's a great example. You can kind of, sort of see what Codex could become over time. These are some, some really interesting kind of platforms that are emerging.swyx: Okay. Um, I wanted to, we touched on evals a little bit. You had, you had the report that you're gonna go bring up and then I was gonna go into like, uh, boxes, evals, but uh, go ahead. Talk about your genetic search thing.Jeff Huber: Yeah. Mostly I think kinda a few of the insights. It's like number one frontier model is not good at search.Humans have this [00:30:00] natural explore, exploit trade off where we kinda understand like when to stop doing something. Also, humans are pretty good at like forgetting actually, and like pruning their own context, whereas agents are not, and actually an agent in their kind of context history, if they knew something was bad and they even, you could see in the trace the reason you trace, Hey, that probably wasn't a good idea.If it's still in the trace, still in the context, they'll still do it again. Uhhuh. Uh, and so like, I think pruning is also gonna be like, really, it's already becoming a thing, right? But like, letting self prune the con windowsswyx: be a big deal. Yeah. So, so don't leave the mistake. Don't leave the mistake in there.Cut out the mistake but tell it that you made a mistake in the past and so it doesn't repeat it.Jeff Huber: Yeah. But like cut it out so it doesn't get like distracted by it again. ‘cause really, you know, what is so, so it will repeat its mistake just because it's been, it's inswyx: theJeff Huber: context. It'sAaron Levie: in the context so much.That's a few shot example. Even if it, yeah.Jeff Huber: It's like oh thisAaron Levie: is a great thing to go try even ifJeff Huber: it didn't work.Aaron Levie: Yeah,Jeff Huber: exactly.Aaron Levie: SoJeff Huber: there's like a bunch of stuff there. JustAaron Levie: Groundhogs Day inside these models. Yeah. I'm gonna go keep doing the same wrongJeff Huber: thing. Covering sense. I feel like, you know, some creator analogy you're trying like fit a manifold in latent space, which kind is doing break program synthesis, which is kinda one we think about we're doing right.Like, you know, certain [00:31:00] facts might be like sort of overly pitting it. There are certain, you know, sec sectors of latent space and so like plug clean space. Yeah. And, uh, andswyx: so we have a bell, our editor as a bell every time you say that. SoJeff Huber: you have, you have to like remove those, likeswyx: you shoulda a gong like TPN or something.IfJeff Huber: we gong, you either remove those links to like kinda give it the freedom, kind of do what you need to do. So, but yeah. We'll, we'll release more soon. That'sAaron Levie: awesome.Jeff Huber: That'll, that'll be cool.swyx: We're a cerebral podcast that people listen to us and, and sort of think really deep. So yeah, we try to keep it subtle.Okay. We try to keep it.Aaron Levie: Okay, fine.Inside Agent Evalsswyx: Um, you, you guys do, you guys do have EVs, you talked about your, your office thing, but, uh, you've been also promoting APEX agents and complex work. Uh, yeah, whatever you, wherever you wanna take this just Yeah. How youAaron Levie: Apex is, is obviously me, core's, uh, uh, kind of, um, agent eval.We, we supported that by sort of. Opening up some data for them around how we kind of see these, um, data workspaces in, in the, you know, kind of regular economy. So how do lawyers have a workspace? How do investment bankers have a workspace? What kind of data goes into those? And so we, [00:32:00] we partner with them on their, their apex eval.Our own, um, eval is, it's actually relatively straightforward. We have a, a set of, of documents in a, in a range of industries. We give the agent previously did this as a one shot test of just purely the model. And then we just realized we, we need to, based on where everything's going, it's just gotta be more agentic.So now it's a bit more of a test of both our harness and the model. And we have a rubric of a set of things that has to get right and we score it. Um, and you're just seeing, you know, these incredible jumps in almost every single model in its own family of, you know, opus four, um, you know, sonnet four six versus sonnet four five.swyx: Yeah. We have this up on screen.Aaron Levie: Okay, cool. So some, you're seeing it somewhere like. I, I forget the to, it was like 15 point jump, I think on the main, on the overall,swyx: yes.Aaron Levie: And it's just like, you know, these incredible leaps that, that are starting to happen. Um,swyx: and OP doesn't know any, like any, it's completely held out from op.Aaron Levie: This is not in any, there's no public data which has, you know, Ben benefits and this is just a private eval that we [00:33:00] do, and then we just happen to show it to, to the world. Hmm. So you can't, you can't train against it. And I think it's just as representative of. It's obviously reasoning capabilities, what it's doing at, at, you know, kind of test time, compute capabilities, thinking levels, all like the context rot issues.So many interesting, you know, kind of, uh, uh, capabilities that are, that are now improvingswyx: one sector that you have. That's interesting.Industries and Datasetsswyx: Uh, people are roughly familiar with healthcare and legal, but you have public sector in there.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Uh, what's that? Like, what, what, what is that?Aaron Levie: Yeah, and, and we actually test against, I dunno, maybe 10 industries.We, we end up usually just cutting a few that we think have interesting gains. All extras, won a lot of like government type documents. Um,swyx: what is that? What is it? Government type documents?Aaron Levie: Government filings. Like a taxswyx: return, likeAaron Levie: a probably not tax returns. It would be more of what would go the government be using, uh, as data.So, okay. Um, so think about research that, that type of, of, of data sets. And then we have financial services for things like data rooms and what would be in an investment prospectus. Uhhuh,swyx: that one you can dog food.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. [00:34:00] So, uh, so we, we run the models, um, in now, you know, more of an agent mode, but, but still with, with kinda limited capacity and just try and see like on a, like, for like basis, what are the improvements?And, and again, we just continue to be blown away by. How, how good these models are getting.swyx: Yeah, I mean, I think every serious AI company needs something like that where like, well, this is the work we do. Here's our company eval. Yeah. And if you don't have it, well, you're not a serious AI company.Aaron Levie: There's two dimensions, right?So there's, there's like, how are the models improving? And so which models should you either recommend a customer use, which one should you adopt? But then every single day, we're making changes to our agents. And you need to knowswyx: if you regressed,Aaron Levie: if you know. Yeah. You know, I've been fully convinced that the whole agent observability and eval space is gonna be a massive space.Um, super excited for what Braintrust is doing, excited for, you know, Lang Smith, all the things. And I think what you're going to, I mean, this is like every enter like literally every enterprise right now. It's like the AI companies are the customers of these tools. Every enterprise will have this. Yeah, you'll just [00:35:00] have to have an eval.Of all of your work and like, we'll, you'll have an eval of your RFP generation, you'll have an eval of your sales material creation. You'll have an eval of your, uh, invoice processing. And, and as you, you know, buy or use new agentic systems, you are gonna need to know like, what's the quality of your, of your pipeline.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: Um, so huge, huge market with agent evals.swyx: Yeah.Building the Agent Teamswyx: And, and you know, I'm gonna shout out your, your team a bit, uh, your CTO, Ben, uh, did a great talk with us last year. Awesome. And he's gonna come back again. Oh, cool. For World's Fair.Aaron Levie: Yep.swyx: Just talk about your team, like brag a little bit. I think I, I think people take these eval numbers in pretty charts for granted, but No, there, I mean, there's, there's lots of really smart people at work during all this.Aaron Levie: Biggest shout out, uh, is we have a, we have a couple folks at Dya, uh, Sidarth, uh, that, that kind of run this. They're like a, you know, kind of tag tag team duo on our evals, Ben, our CTO, heavily involved Yasha, head of ai, uh, you know, a bunch of folks. And, um, evals is one part of the story. And then just like the full, you know, kind of AI.An agent team [00:36:00] is, uh, is a, is a pretty, you know, is core to this whole effort. So there's probably, I don't know, like maybe a few dozen people that are like the epicenter. And then you just have like layers and layers of, of kind of concentric circles of okay, then there's a search team that supports them and an infrastructure team that supports them.And it's starting to ripple through the entire company. But there's that kind of core agent team, um, that's a pretty, pretty close, uh, close knit group.swyx: The search team is separate from the infra team.Aaron Levie: I mean, we have like every, every layer of the stack we have to kind of do, except for just pure public cloud.Um, but um, you know, we, we store, I don't even know what our public numbers are in, you know, but like, you can just think about it as like a lot of data is, is stored in box. And so we have, and you have every layer of the, of the stack of, you know, how do you manage the data, the file system, the metadata system, the search system, just all of those components.And then they all are having to understand that now you've got this new customer. Which is the agent, and they've been building for two types of customers in the past. They've been building for users and they've been building for like applications. [00:37:00] And now you've got this new agent user, and it comes in with a difference of it, of property sometimes, like, hey, maybe sometimes we should do embeddings, an embedding based, you know, kind of search versus, you know, your, your typical semantic search.Like, it's just like you have to build the, the capabilities to support all of this. And we're testing stuff, throwing things away, something doesn't work and, and not relevant. It's like just, you know, total chaos. But all of those teams are supporting the agent team that is kind of coming up with its requirements of what, what do we need?swyx: Yeah. No, uh, we just came from, uh, fireside chat where you did, and you, you talked about how you're doing this. It's, it's kind of like an internal startup. Yeah. Within the broader company. The broader company's like 3000 people. Yeah. But you know, there's, there's a, this is a core team of like, well, here's the innovation center.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And like that every company kind of is run this way.Aaron Levie: Yeah. I wanna be sensitive. I don't call it the innovation center. Yeah. Only because I think everybody has to do innovation. Um, there, there's a part of the, the, the company that is, is sort of do or die for the agent wave.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And it only happens to be more of my focus simply because it's existential that [00:38:00] we get it right.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: All of the supporting systems are necessary. All of the surrounding adjacent capabilities are necessary. Like the only reason we get to be a platform where you'd run an agent is because we have a security feature or a compliance feature, or a governance feature that, that some team is working on.But that's not gonna be the make or break of, of whether we get agents right. Like that already exists and we need to keep innovating there. I don't know what the right, exact precise number is, but it's not a thousand people and it's not 10 people. There's a number of people that are like the, the kind of like, you know, startup within the company that are the make or break on everything related to AI agents, you know, leveraging our platform and letting you work with your data.And that's where I spend a lot of my time, and Ben and Yosh and Diego and Teri, you know, these are just, you know, people that, that, you know, kind of across the team. Are working.swyx: Yeah. Amazing.Read Write Agent WorkflowsJeff Huber: How do you, how do you think about, I mean, you talked a lot about like kinda read workflows over your box data. Yep.Right. You know, gen search questions, queries, et cetera. But like, what about like, write or like authoring workflows?Aaron Levie: Yes. I've [00:39:00] already probably revealed too much actually now that I think about it. So, um, I've talked about whatever,Jeff Huber: whatever you can.Aaron Levie: Okay. It's just us. It's just us. Yeah. Okay. Of course, of course.So I, I guess I would just, uh, I'll make it a little bit conceptual, uh, because again, I've already, I've already said things that are not even ga but, but we've, we've kinda like danced around it publicly, so I, yeah, yeah. Okay. Just like, hopefully nobody watches this, um, episode. No.swyx: It's tidbits for the Heidi engaged to go figure out like what exactly, um, you know, is, is your sort of line of thinking.Sure. They can connect the dots.Aaron Levie: Yeah. So, so I would say that, that, uh, we, you know, as a, as a place where you have your enterprise content, there's a use case where I want to, you know, have an agent read that data and answer questions for me. And then there's a use case where I want the agent to create something.And use the file system to create something or store off data that it's working on, or be able to have, you know, various files that it's writing to about the work it's doing. So we do see it as a total read write. The harder problem has so far been the read only because, because again, you have that kind of like 10 [00:40:00] million to one ratio problem, whereas rights are a lot of, that's just gonna come from the model and, and we just like, we'll just put it in the file system and kinda use it.So it's a little bit of a technically easier problem, but the only part that's like, not necessarily technically hard, it is just like it's not yet perfected in the state of the ecosystem is, you know, building a beautiful PowerPoint presentation. It's still a hard problem for these models. Like, like we still, you know, like, like these formats are just, we're not built for.They'reswyx: working on it.Aaron Levie: They're, they're working on it. Everybody's working on it.swyx: Every launch is like, well, we do PowerPoint now.Aaron Levie: We're getting, yeah, getting a lot, getting a lot of better each time. But then you'll do this thing where you'll ask the update one slide and all of a sudden, like the fonts will be just like a little bit different, you know, on two of the slides, or it moved, you know, some shape over to the left a little bit.And again, these are the kind of things that, like in code, obviously you could really care about if you really care about, you know, how beautiful is the code, but at the end, user doesn't notice all those problems and file creation, the end user instantly sees it. You're [00:41:00] like, ah, like paragraph three, like, you literally just changed the font on me.Like it's a totally different font and like midway through the document. Mm-hmm. Those are the kind of things that you run into a lot of in the, in the content creation side. So, mm-hmm. We are gonna have native agents. That do all of those things, they'll be powered by the leading kind of models and labs.But the thing that I think is, is probably gonna be a much bigger idea over time is any agent on any system, again, using Box as a file system for its work, and in that kind of scenario, we don't necessarily care what it's putting in the file system. It could put its memory files, it could put its, you know, specification, you know, documents.It could put, you know, whatever its markdown files are, or it could, you know, generate PDFs. It's just like, it's a workspace that is, is sort of sandboxed off for its work. People can collaborate into it, it can share with other people. And, and so we, we were thinking a lot about what's the right, you know, kind of way to, to deliver that at scale.Docs Graphs and Founder Modeswyx: I wanted to come into sort of the sort of AI transformation or AI sort of, uh, operations things. [00:42:00] Um, one of the tweets that you, that you wanted to talk about, this is just me going through your tweets, by the way. Oh, okay. I mean, like, this is, you readAaron Levie: one by one,swyx: you're the, you're the easiest guest to prep for because you, you already have like, this is the, this is what I'm interested in.I'm like, okay, well, areAaron Levie: we gonna get to like, like February, January or something? Where are we in the, in the timelines? How far back are we going?swyx: Can you, can you describe boxes? A set of skills? Right? Like that, that's like, that's like one of the extremes of like, well if you, you just turn everything into a markdown file.Yeah. Then your agent can run your company. Uh, like you just have to write, find the right sequence of words toAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: To do it.Aaron Levie: Sorry, isthatswyx: the question? So I think the question is like, what if we documented everything? Yes. The way that you exactly said like,Aaron Levie: yes.swyx: Um, let's get all the Fortune five hundreds, uh, prepared for agents.Yes. And like, you know, everything's in golden and, and nicely filed away and everything. Yes. What's missing? Like, what's left, right? LikeAaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: You've, you've run your company for a decade. LikeAaron Levie: Yeah. I think the challenge is that, that that information changes a week later. And because something happened in the market for that [00:43:00] customer, or us as a company that now has to go get updated, and so these systems are living and breathing and they have to experience reality and updates to reality, which right now is probably gonna be humans, you know, kinda giving those, giving them the updates.And, you know, there is this piece about context graphs as as, uh, that kinda went very viral. Yeah. And I, I, I was like a, i, I, I thought it was super provocative. I agreed with many parts of it. I disagree with a few parts around. You know, it's not gonna be as easy as as just if we just had the agent traces, then we can finally do that work because there's just like, there's so much more other stuff that that's happening that, that we haven't been able to capture and digitize.And I think they actually represented that in the piece to be clear. But like there's just a lot of work, you know, that that has to, you just can't have only skills files, you know, for your company because it's just gonna be like, there's gonna be a lot of other stuff that happens. Yeah. Change over time.Yeah. Most companies are practically apprenticeships.swyx: Most companies are practically apprenticeships. LikeJeff Huber: every new employee who joins the team, [00:44:00] like you span one to three months. Like ramping them up.Aaron Levie: Yes. AllJeff Huber: that tat knowledgeAaron Levie: isJeff Huber: not written down.Aaron Levie: Yes.Jeff Huber: But like, it would have to be if you wanted to like give it to an Asian.Right. And so like that seems to me like to beAaron Levie: one is I think you're gonna see again a premium on companies that can document this. Mm-hmm. Much. There'll be a huge premium on that because, because you know, can you shorten that three month ramp cycle to a two week ramp cycle? That's an instant productivity gain.Can you re dramatically reduce rework in the organization because you've documented where all the stuff is and where the answers are. Can you make your average employee as good as your 90th percentile employee because you've captured the knowledge that's sort of in the heads of, of those top employees and make that available.So like you can see some very clear productivity benefits. Mm-hmm. If you had a company culture of making sure you know your information was captured, digitized, put in a format that was agent ready and then made available to agents to work with, and then you just, again, have this reality of like add a 10,000 person [00:45:00] company.Mapping that to the, you know, access structure of the company is just a hard problem. Is like, is like, yeah, well, you just, not every piece of information that's digitized can be shared to everybody. And so now you have to organize that in a way that actually works. There was a pretty good piece, um, this, this, uh, this piece called your company as a file is a file system.I, did you see that one?swyx: Nope.Aaron Levie: Uh, yes. You saw it. Yeah. And, and, uh, I actually be curious your thoughts on it. Um, like, like an interesting kind of like, we, we agree with it because, because that's how we see the world and, uh,swyx: okay. We, we have it up on screen. Oh,Aaron Levie: okay. Yeah. But, but it's all about basically like, you know, we've already, we, we, we already organized in this kind of like, you know, permission structure way.Uh, and, and these are the kind of, you know, natural ways that, that agents can now work with data. So it's kind of like this, this, you know, kind of interesting metaphor, but I do think companies will have to start to think about how they start to digitize more, more of that data. What was your take?Jeff Huber: Yeah, I mean, like the company's probably like an acid compliant file system.Aaron Levie: Uh,Jeff Huber: yeah. Which I'm guessing boxes, right? So, yeah. Yes.swyx: Yeah. [00:46:00]Jeff Huber: Which you have a great piece on, but,swyx: uh, yeah. Well, uh, I, I, my, my, my direction is a little bit like, I wanna rewind a little bit to the graph word you said that there, that's a magic trigger word for us. I always ask what's your take on knowledge graphs?Yeah. Uh, ‘cause every, especially at every data database person, I just wanna see what they think. There's been knowledge graphs, hype cycles, and you've seen it all. So.Aaron Levie: Hmm. I actually am not the expert in knowledge graphs, so, so that you might need toswyx: research, you don't need to be an expert. Yeah. I think it's just like, well, how, how seriously do people take it?Yeah. Like, is is, is there a lot of potential in the, in the HOVI?Aaron Levie: Uh, well, can I, can I, uh, understand first if it's, um, is this a loaded question in the sense of are you super pro, super con, super anti medium? Iswyx: see pro, I see pros and cons. Okay. Uh, but I, I think your opinion should be independent of mine.Aaron Levie: Yeah. No, no, totally. Yeah. I just want to see what I'm stepping into.swyx: No, I know. It's a, and it's a huge trigger word for a lot of people out Yeah. In our audience. And they're, they're trying to figure out why is that? Because whyAaron Levie: is this such aswyx: hot item for them? Because a lot of people get graph religion.And they're like, everything's a graph. Of course you have to represent it as a graph. Well, [00:47:00] how do you solve your knowledge? Um, changing over time? Well, it's a graph.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And, and I think there, there's that line of work and then there's, there's a lot of people who are like, well, you don't need it. And both are right.Aaron Levie: Yeah. And what do the people who say you don't need it, what are theyswyx: arguing for Mark down files. Oh, sure, sure. Simplicity.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Versus it's, it's structure versus less structure. Right. That's, that's all what it is. I do.Aaron Levie: I think the tricky thing is, um, is, is again, when this gets met with real humans, they're just going to their computer.They're just working with some people on Slack or teams. They're just sharing some data through a collaborative file system and Google Docs or Box or whatever. I certainly like the vision of most, most knowledge graph, you know, kind of futuristic kind of ways of thinking about it. Uh, it's just like, you know, it's 2026.We haven't seen it yet. Kind of play out as as, I mean, I remember. Do you remember the, um, in like, actually I don't, I don't even know how old you guys are, but I'll for, for to show my age. I remember 17 years ago, everybody thought enterprises would just run on [00:48:00] Wikis. Yeah. And, uh, confluence and, and not even, I mean, confluence actually took off for engineering for sure.Like unquestionably. But like, this was like everything would be in the w. And I think based on our, uh, our, uh, general style of, of, of what we were building, like we were just like, I don't know, people just like wanna workspace. They're gonna collaborate with other people.swyx: Exactly. Yeah. So you were, you were anti-knowledge graph.Aaron Levie: Not anti, not anti. Soswyx: not nonAaron Levie: I'm not, I'm not anti. ‘cause I think, I think your search system, I just think these are two systems that probably, but like, I'm, I'm not in any religious war. I don't want to be in anybody's YouTube comments on this. There's not a fight for me.swyx: We, we love YouTube comments. We're, we're, we're get into comments.Aaron Levie: Okay. Uh, but like, but I, I, it's mostly just a virtue of what we built. Yeah. And we just continued down that path. Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And, um, and that, that was what we pursued. But I'm not, this is not a, you know, kind of, this is not a, uh, it'sswyx: not existential for you. Great.Aaron Levie: We're happy to plug into somebody else's graph.We're happy to feed data into it. We're happy for [00:49:00] agents to, to talk to multiple systems. Not, not our fight.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: But I need your answer. Yeah. Graphs or nerd Snipes is very effective nerd.swyx: See this is, this is one, one opinion and then I've,Jeff Huber: and I think that the actual graph structure is emergent in the mind of the agent.Ah, in the same way it is in the mind of the human. And that's a more powerful graph ‘cause it actually involved over time.swyx: So don't tell me how to graph. I'll, I'll figure it out myself. Exactly. Okay. All right. AndJeff Huber: what's yours?swyx: I like the, the Wiki approach. Uh, my, I'm actually

“I don't think we're sleepwalking, because people have striven to be as thoughtful as possible. In some ways, they've been too thoughtful. We're paralysed, in fact, by our risk awareness.” — Christopher ClarkIt's 1830 in East Prussia. The city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment—at least in the minds of people who'd never been there. But that glow, it goes without saying, is illusionary. The greatest of all Königsberg citizens, the illustrious 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant is dead. Napoleon's shattered army limped west back through the city two decades earlier after its failed invasion of Russia. The place had slipped into a sad provinciality, living off 18th century nostalgia. And then two Lutheran preachers, so-called “Muckers”, get accused of running a sex cult.Christopher Clark—Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, author of the brilliant The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring—has been brooding on this story for thirty years. His short new book, A Scandal in Königsberg, is a Prussian microhistory with global ambition. The scandal, he says, was entirely fabricated: no sexual transgressions ever occurred. The two Muckers were convicted, stripped (so to speak) of office, and imprisoned, then exonerated on appeal – giving this case more historical significance than a mere sex scandal.What made them targets? They were evangelical in a city that prized Kantian rationalism. They followed a dead mystic who believed creation was born from two cosmic spheres—fire and water—which sounded like dangerously mystical in the scientific age of steam power. And the lead preacher, Johann Ebel, committed the unforgivable sin of listening to women confess their unhappy marriages. In a pre-Freudian central Europe, Ebel became the confidant the men of Königsberg couldn't abide.And then there's Iran — far from 19th century East Prussia, but on all of our minds right now. At the end of our conversation, I couldn't resist asking Clark if he thinks we are sleepwalking into another catastrophic world war. He doesn't think so. The problem in 1914 was a failure of imagination, he says. Today, Clark argues, we're actually paralysed by a fear of risk. The Iran invasion is certainly stress testing the international system. But the one thing most people agree on, Clark notes with characteristic dryness, is that nobody much regrets any damage done to the regime of the Mullahs. Even if, as he warns, we still don't know whether decision to invade Iran was smart or reckless. The Mullahs, at least, aren't quite Muckers. Five Takeaways•       This Was a Scandal Without a Transgression: Most scandals expose something real. The Mucker scandal was different: the sexual allegations were entirely invented. Two clergymen were stripped of office, fined, and imprisoned—then exonerated on appeal when a sharp young lawyer proved the charges were fabrications. The process of invention, Clark argues, is more interesting than any transgression could have been.•       Steam Was the AI of the 1830s: The two preachers at the center of the scandal were followers of a dead mystic who believed creation was born from two cosmic spheres—fire and water. In the age of steam, that sounded like science. Königsbergers only saw their first steam engine in the 1820s. New technology makes old ideas feel prophetic—a pattern we might recognise.•       The Preacher Women Loved: Johann Ebel attracted women from the best families of Königsberg because he listened to them. There were no couples counsellors, no psychoanalysts—only clergymen. Ebel was non-judgmental about sexual life within marriage. The men around him found this intolerable. The scandal was driven not by what Ebel did, but by what he represented: a threat to patriarchal authority.•       We're Not Sleepwalking—We're Paralysed: Clark wrote the book on how Europe sleepwalked into 1914. He doesn't think the analogy holds today. The problem in 1914 was a failure of imagination—nobody could see the other side's perspective. Today we're hyper-aware of risk, especially nuclear risk. If anything, we're too thoughtful—paralysed by what we know rather than blind to what we don't.•       Iran and the Crumple Zone: The invasion of Iran is testing the edges of the international system. Clark notes that both Putin and the US-Israel alliance have chosen targets without nuclear weapons—probing the crumple zone rather than the core. The danger is an unintentional transition to nuclear exchange. And we still don't know whether the decision to strike Iran was smart or reckless. About the GuestChristopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848–1849, Iron Kingdom, Time and Power, and the new book A Scandal in Königsberg. He was knighted in 2015 for services to Anglo-German relations.ReferencesBooks and references mentioned:•       The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark•       Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848–1849 by Christopher Clark•       Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and the Enlightenment heritage of Königsberg•       Leonhard Euler and the Seven Bridges of Königsberg—the birth of modern topology•       The Coming Storm by Odd Arne Westad—referenced in the closing discussion on sleepwalking into warAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstack

“We should all be able to look at the numbers and agree that this is not sustainable and that whatever we've been doing is not working. Democrats have had their chance, and Republicans have had their chance, and it's only gotten worse.” — Halle TeccoWarren Buffett called America's healthcare costs “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” That tapeworm now devours nearly a fifth of the nation's GDP—and the patient, as always, is on the table. We dedicate today's show to this most perennial of all America's problems, with two guests and two new books that approach the tragi-comedy from different angles.Self-styled innovation wonk Halle Tecco—founder of Rock Health, investor in over fifty digital health companies, professor at Columbia Business School—argues in Massively Better Healthcare that the system is both excessively public and excessively private, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy in which verticalized health plans now own the PBMs, the pharmacies, and increasingly the doctors. The result is monopoly medicine on a scale that would have appalled the original trust-busters.This is ultimately an antitrust story. As we've discussed on the show with Tim Wu, Biden's chief antitrust enforcer, the concentration of corporate power is the great unfinished business of American democracy. Tecco makes the case that Big Med is where the trust busters should go next after Big Tech. UnitedHealth is now one of the largest employers of doctors in the country. So it wasn't exactly shocking when the UnitedHealth CEO was assassinated two years ago. The system isn't broken, Tecco suggests. It's working exactly as designed—just not for patients.Surgeon Robin Blackstone, MD, author of Doctor AI: Reimagining Health. Rebuilding Trust. Delivering Health 4.0, joins us in the second half of the show to offer a view from the front lines. After 30 years as a surgeon, Blackstone confirms everything Tecco diagnoses—and adds a chilling detail of her own: the system is priced entirely for fixing illness, not preventing it. Her prescription is a “triangle of trust” between patient, physician, and AI—with the patient finally owning their own data.Both agree on one thing: every dollar spent on public health saves $14.30 in medical and societal costs. We are all already paying for all the waste. We just need to fix Big Med. But who's going to do it? Tecco says that America is ready for another round of Obamacare politics. But I'm not so sure. Five Takeaways•       Healthcare Is a Tale of Two Civilizations: If you're wealthy, you go to UCSF and get the best care in the world. If you're not, you're one of the 100 million Americans without a regular primary care provider. Healthcare debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy. A person earning $30,000 in a rural county can expect to live a full decade less than someone earning $100,000 in an affluent suburb.•       The Real Winners Are Monopoly Medicine: Verticalized health plans now own the PBMs, the pharmacies, and increasingly the providers. The ACA's profit cap forced them to grow the pie instead of getting more efficient. United is now one of the largest employers of doctors in the country. Independent pharmacies are closing at the rate of one per day. Rite Aid is bankrupt—the only major chain not owned by a health plan.•       Every $1 in Public Health Saves $14.30: We're already paying for the crisis—in emergency room visits, lost productivity, and disability. We just need to move the safety net upstream. Public health is the only part of the system designed for prevention, yet its share of total health spending has dropped 25% in two decades. The economic case is overwhelming. The political will is not.•       AI Could Break the Information Asymmetry: Patients are already using ChatGPT to diagnose themselves—and sometimes it's saving their lives. One woman caught her own pneumonia because her doctor couldn't see her for a week. But some doctors want to keep the paternalism: one AI tool built on medical journals is restricted to clinicians only because making it available to patients would “piss off the doctors.”•       The System Is Priced for Rescue, Not Health: Everything is loaded to the moment your gallbladder goes bad or your heart gets a blockage. Prevention doesn't get paid for. Both guests agree: we need a massive re-pricing that rewards keeping people healthy, not just treating them when they're sick. That means paying doctors to prevent strokes, not just to fix them. About the GuestsHalle Tecco is the founder of the venture fund Rock Health and an investor in more than fifty digital health companies. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and a course director at Harvard Medical School. Her new book is Massively Better Healthcare: The Innovator's Guide to Tackling Healthcare's Biggest Challenges (Columbia University Press).Robin Blackstone, MD, is a physician, health systems architect, and founder of Blackstone Health. A surgeon by training with 30 years of clinical experience, she is the author of Doctor AI: Reimagining Health. Rebuilding Trust. Delivering Health 4.0.ReferencesPrevious Keen On episodes and authors mentioned:•       Robert Pearl on how AI will be monetized in the healthcare industry•       Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism•       Zeke Emanuel on which country has the world's best healthcare•       Warren Buffett on healthcare costs as “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy”About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 02/27/2026Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie HarrisFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.aiRead out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/In this episode:Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI's Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic's Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity's multi-agent “Computer” coordinator.Compute and business moves include Meta's reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior.Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China's plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints.Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic's report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI's report on disrupting malicious use.A thank you to our current sponsors:Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn moreODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a yearTimestamps:(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:01:52) News PreviewTools & Apps(00:03:20) Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch(00:11:24) Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET(00:14:54) Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India(00:18:06) Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat(00:21:01) Perplexity announces "Computer," an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars TechnicaApplications & Business(00:23:40) Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases 'personal superintelligence' | TechCrunch(00:27:05) Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch(00:31:00) World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch(00:33:07) Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior(00:33:52) Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers(00:36:43) China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030Research & Advancements(00:40:33) On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers(00:48:03) Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens(00:54:52) models have some pretty funny attractor states(01:01:41) When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task(01:05:16) BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance(01:12:00) NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist(01:13:15) The least understood driver of AI progress(01:21:45) The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like HumansPolicy & Safety(01:25:04) Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon's threats 'do not change our position' on AI(01:33:04) Musk's xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems(01:34:17) Detecting and preventing distillation attacks(01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLESee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“If we let things continue in the direction that they are taking now, I think it is more likely than not that we will end up in some kind of Great Power war within the foreseeable future.” — Arne WestadThis conversation was recorded before the invasion of Iran, which makes what you are about to hear even more chilling. In his new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History, Yale historian Arne Westad warns that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the world before the First World War are too striking to ignore—and he names the Middle East as one of the flashpoints that could spark a much broader conflagration.Westad argues that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the world before the First World War are “striking.” A dominant power (USA) withdrawing from the international system it created. Rising inequality and globalization backlash. New technologies that speed up time and shrink the window for decision-making. A rising Great Power—China—that, like Wilhelmine Germany, simply cannot stop growing. And a declining empire—Russia—that, like Austria-Hungary, has quarrels on every border and an alliance with the rising power next door.The cast of characters, Westad warns, is also uncomfortably familiar. Trump is Joseph Chamberlain—the British conservative who turned his party against the free trade system it had championed. Putin's Russia is Austria-Hungary: an empire in long-term decline that acted in 1914 because it believed Germany would back it up. And nuclear weapons? Before 1914, people wrote long books about how new military technologies made war unthinkable. We are taking refuge in that same bad logic today.The difference, Westad insists, is that we know how 1914 ended. We have international institutions built to prevent it. And we still have time—but not much, he warns—to forge the kind of Great Power compromise that could pull us back from the brink. Whether we will is another question entirely. Especially given our current historical amnesia. So might Archduke Ferdinand be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this time around? Stay tuned. It's squeaky bum time once again in world history. Five Takeaways•       We're Living in a Pre-1914 Moment: A multipolar world. Rising inequality. Globalization backlash. New technologies that speed up time and reduce the window for decision-making. A dominant power withdrawing from the international system it created. The structural parallels between the early 20th century and the 2020s are, in Westad's word, “striking.”•       China Is the New Germany: A rapidly rising Great Power that can't stop growing, generating dissonance in an established international system. As the British told the Germans: “If you could just stop growing, little Hans, all would be fine and dandy.” That's exactly what China cannot do. And it takes two to tango on compromise.•       Russia Is the New Austria-Hungary: An empire in long-term decline with quarrels on every border, allied to the most rapidly rising Great Power next to it. Austria acted in 1914 because they believed Germany would back them up. The parallel to the China-Russia relationship today is uncomfortably close.•       Trump Is Joseph Chamberlain: The British conservative who turned his party against the free trade system it had championed. Chamberlain never made it to prime minister, but he came close and reshaped his party in ways no one foresaw—exactly what Trump has done to the Republicans.•       Nuclear Weapons May Not Save Us: Before 1914, people wrote long books about how new military technologies—poison gas, battleships, aerial bombardment—made war unthinkable. We are taking refuge in the same logic today. Westad is not so sure the deterrent fully holds anymore. About the GuestOdd Arne Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is the author of The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History as well as The Cold War: A World History, The Global Cold War (winner of the Bancroft Prize), and Restless Empire (winner of the Asia Society Book Award).ReferencesBooks and authors mentioned:•       Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, on how Europe stumbled into the First World War (previous Keen On guest)•       Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900–1914, on technology and cultural disruption before the war•       Paul Kennedy, on the rise of British-German antagonism and Great Power rivalry•       Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (referenced in the Sutton episode the previous day)About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“When you use humor to degrade people, you can get away with it—but you're also doing something that's completely devastating.” — Rhae Lynn BarnesDonald Trump's recent retweet of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as apes was dismissed by his supporters as “just a joke”—another example, they claimed, of liberals lacking a sense of humor. But Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes argues that this kind of “humor” is anything but innocent. It draws on a centuries-long white supremacist tradition of dehumanization—one that stretches back to the origins of American mass entertainment itself.In her book, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, Barnes traces how Blackface minstrelsy became the quintessential American cultural form—America's first great entertainment export—shaping music, comedy, performance, and politics from the 19th century through the 20th. Barnes explains how P.T. Barnum helped popularize the grotesque “scientific” spectacle of Black people as the missing link in evolution, and how the Barnum model of hoax-driven mass media foreshadows Trump's own relationship with controversy, “fake news,” and attention.Barnes argues that Blackface wasn't merely a fringe theatrical practice. It was normalized—then institutionalized—through schools, churches, civic clubs, and even the federal government. The result was an intergenerational system for teaching white supremacy through catchy songs, jokes, and seemingly harmless performance.For Barnes, the most important chapter of the Darkology story is the Black resistance minstrelsy triggered—from Frederick Douglass's campaign of dignified self-representation to NAACP organizers and Black veterans who fought to remove minstrel shows from schools and public life. Rather than anti-American, Barnes insists that confronting this censored cultural history is the patriotic duty of all Americans. That's America's defining story, she says. The pursuit of freedom—and the ongoing struggle to live up to it. Five Takeaways1. Racist Humor Has Deep Roots: What gets dismissed today as “just a joke” belongs to a centuries-old tradition of dehumanizing caricature that masked cruelty as entertainment.1. Blackface Was America's Cultural Foundation: Minstrelsy shaped American comedy, music, performance—and even political campaigning. It was the quintessential American entertainment form.1. Barnum Invented the Spectacle Model: Hoax-driven media sensation fused with racial pseudo-science and spectacle long before modern political showmanship adopted the formula.1. White Supremacy Was Taught as Fun: Catchy songs, simple dances, and comic routines created an intergenerational system of racial socialization embedded in schools, churches, and civic clubs.1. Patriotism Requires Historical Honesty: Confronting this censored past strengthens democracy. America's defining story is the pursuit of freedom—not the denial of injustice. About the GuestRhae Lynn Barnes is a historian and professor at Princeton University. She is the author of Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. ReferencesPrevious Keen On episodes mentioned:1. None About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction (00:25) - Trump, race, and “just a joke” (01:31) - The long history behind the meme (02:30) - P.T. Barnum and the “What Is It?” (03:41) - Barnum, hoaxes, and Trump's media instinct (05:39) - Blackface as America's signature entertainment (07:34) - When “minstrelsy” goes mainstream (09:50) - Black responses: Douglass to Ragtime (12:28) - Veterans, schools, and the NAACP fightback (17:54) - Presidents, power, and “Whiteology” (19:50) - Humor as an intergenerational weapon (21:20) - Immigration and learning “whiteness” (22:30) - Is American history defined by white supremacy? (24:00) - The pursuit of freedom—and confronting the past (28:18) - Why this history still matters now (31:11) - Gerald Ford and the politics of Blackface (32:56) - Closing thoughts and goodbye

Mr. Beast Biography Flash a weekly Biography.Hey there, fabulous listeners, its your girl Roxie Rush here, your AI-powered gossip whirlwind, and thank you for tuning into the MrBeast podcast. Being AI means I sift through the chaos faster than you can say viral video, delivering the hottest, verified scoops without the fake news fluffwhats not to love?Buckle up, because MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, is making power moves that scream empire builder. Just days ago, Beast Industries snapped up Step, the Gen Z banking app with over 7 million users peddling credit-building and investing tools for teens, according to TechCrunch and The Publish Press. Jimmy spilled on X, Nobody taught me about investing or managing money growing upI want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had. TechCrunch reports hes eyeing a financial education YouTube channel and even Beast Financial trademarks, with whispers of an IPO push via recurring revenue plays. This could redefine his $5 billion Beast empire long-term, darlingtalk about leveling up from chocolates to cash flow.But hold the confettiKalshi dropped a bombshell Wednesday, fining and suspending MrBeasts editor Artem Kaptur $15,000 for insider trading on prediction markets betting his videos success, per CBS News. Beast Industries fired back with zero tolerance and an independent probe underway. No direct Jimmy drama, but it spotlights the heat on his fast-growing team.Older chatter from Fortune echoes Jimmy borrowing cash from mom for his wedding despite a $2.6 billion net worth, all reinvested into contenthes laser-focused, not lounging.No fresh public sightings or social fireworks in the last 24 hours, but this Step acquisition? Pure biographical gold, positioning Beast as fintech king.Thats your MrBeast flash, crewthank you for listening, hit subscribe to never miss an update on MrBeast, and search Biography Flash for more great biographies. Muah!And that is it for today. Make sure you hit the subscribe button and never miss an update on Mr. Beast. Thanks for listening. This has been a Quiet Please production."Get the best deals https://amzn.to/4mMClBvThis content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI

“If you disestablish Christianity, then Christian leaders need to make Christianity a consumer product. They need to give the American people something they want.” — Matthew Avery SuttonOver the years, Keen On has done many shows on the relationship between the United States and organized religion. Daniel Williams argued that smart people still believe in God. Jim Wallis warned that a false white gospel is threatening America. But we've never quite done a show on Christianity as “the thing in itself”—the force that made America what it is, for better and for worse. That's what this conversation is about.Historian Matthew Avery Sutton's new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, is a sweeping argument that Christianity is not just part of the American story—it is the American story. The founders created a godless Constitution not out of principle but pragmatism: they couldn't pick a winning denomination. The unintended consequence was to open the floodgates. Powerful Protestant groups seized even more power, building an unofficial establishment that shaped everything from westward expansion to the Civil War to the rise of the religious right.Sutton's most provocative insight is that disestablishment turned Christianity into a consumer product. Forced to compete for adherents against entertainment, sports, and media, American churches became entrepreneurial, technologically savvy, and relentlessly current—reinventing themselves every generation. That's what sets American Christianity apart from the rest of the Western world. It also helps explain Trump: a president who uses Christianity in a “crass, overt, and hypocritical” way, but who is doing something that generations before him built the infrastructure to enable. Whether this is Christianity's last gasp or the prelude to another great revival, Sutton says, nobody knows. But the air we breathe in America is Christian air, and this book explains how it got that way. Five Takeaways•       The Godless Constitution Backfired: The founders couldn't pick a winning denomination, so they disestablished religion. It was pragmatic, not ideological. But this opened the floodgates. The Christians who already had the most power—Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians—seized even more, creating an unofficial Protestant establishment that determined who was in and who was out.•       Christianity Became a Consumer Product: Disestablishment forced churches to compete for adherents. They had to be aggressive, entrepreneurial, current—competing with entertainment, sports, and media. They became masters of new technologies and communication, reinventing Christianity every generation. That's what sets American Christianity apart from the rest of the world: an unintended consequence of the First Amendment.•       The Civil War Was Christians Killing Christians: Presbyterians killing Presbyterians, Methodists killing Methodists. It exposed the fragility of the effort to build a Christian utopia when you can't settle the question of slavery. The Confederates actually wrote God and Jesus Christ into their constitution—they believed the Union had gone off the rails because its Constitution was too godless.•       The Liberationists Are the Heroes: Indigenous preachers who saw Jesus as liberator, Black Christians, gay rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s, Barack Obama. There have always been alternative visions of Christianity in America. Sutton's heroes are those who see Jesus as a radical figure who wants to overturn hierarchies and bring equality.•       This May Be Christianity's Last Gasp—Or Not: Just under two-thirds of Americans now identify as Christian—a historic low. Trump's hypocrisy is driving young people away. In anointing Trump as their savior, the religious right may have hammered the final nail into their coffin. But every time scholars predict secularization, America has a revival. Nobody knows what's next. About the GuestMatthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of History at Washington State University. He is the author of Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity as well as American Apocalypse and Double Crossed, and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.ReferencesPrevious Keen On episodes mentioned:•       Daniel Williams on why smart people still believe in God•       Jim Wallis on the false white gospel and faith and justice•       Margaret Atwood on The Handmaid's TaleAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: Christianity as "the thing in itself" (02:11) - Is this really a surprise? (04:05) - Which Christianity? Questions of power (06:36) - The founders and the godless Constitution (08:55) - Was it a coup? (11:15) - Jacksonian democracy and revivalism (12:56) - Colonizing the West and Native Americans (16:03) - What does evangelical actually mean? (17:31) - The Civil War as a religious war (21:05) - Max Weber and Christianity as consumer product (28:02) - Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale (30:17) - Peter Thiel and the Antichrist (36:31) - Is this Christianity's last gasp?

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“We keep telling you there's an eviction crisis, so organize with us. Feel free to come into our meetings. Feel free to learn about the lives of people who have been here for a long time.” — Manissa MaharawalYesterday we spoke with anthropologist Ida Susser about France's Yellow Vests—provincial truck drivers, nurses, and teachers who drove hours to Paris, furious about decades of disinvestment in their economy. So does America have its own Yellow Vests? You might find them in (of all places) the San Francisco Bay Area, the setting of a new book by a former student of Susser's about what happens when the same disruptive economic forces hit an American city.Anthropologist Manissa Maharawal's new book, Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco, chronicles the grassroots movement that rose up against big tech during the boom of the 2010s. Like the French Yellow Vests, these were ordinary people from the San Francisco Bay Area—teachers, bartenders, nurses, copy editors—who refused to accept their displacement as inevitable. Like the Yellow Vests, they grew out of no political party or even ideology. The anti-eviction movement emerged from Occupy, just as the gilets jaunes emerged from the roundabouts outside Paris.Anti-tech activists in San Francisco's Mission District watched Google buses roll through their neighborhoods and decided to blockade them. But where the Yellow Vests defied the left-right spectrum, Maharawal's activists have a clear target: the neoliberal market logic that justifies gentrification as the result of “inevitable” market forces. She is sharply critical of the abundance argument advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, arguing this supposedly free market has given the Bay Area a glut of luxury housing and almost no affordable units. The real crisis, she says, isn't too few homes—it's too little regulation on the homes we already have.Fifteen million sit vacant in the United States, Maharawal reminds us. Private equity firms are buying up a quarter of the housing on the market. Even Trump has woken up to this. In a moment of political pessimism on both sides of the Atlantic, both Susser and Maharawal offer evidence that ordinary people can both organize and, at least, shape the political conversation. Five Takeaways•       Tech Gentrification Is Modern Colonization: Activists in San Francisco's Mission District compared Google buses to conquistador transportation—rolling through their neighborhoods, stopping at their bus stops, letting in only young white tech workers while longtime residents stood by with their children. San Francisco had become a company town for the tech industry, with the city rolling out a red carpet—including massive tax breaks—while people in surrounding neighborhoods were evicted.•       The Market Will Never Solve This—And That's the Point: It's never going to be profitable enough to build the deeply affordable low-income housing we actually need. That's why all the housing built in the past fifteen years has been luxury housing. New York City has entire half-empty skyscrapers. San Francisco consistently meets its targets for luxury construction but fails on low-income housing. Market-based solutions alone are insufficient.•       Rent Control Stabilizes Lives, Not Just Rents: Maharawal grew up in a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City—it's the reason her family could stay. Rent stabilization gives people a chance to imagine a future somewhere. The real foil isn't small landlords; it's private equity firms making billions off rental housing. A statewide rent cap proposal in California didn't even make it out of committee in a Democrat-led state.•       The Housing Crisis Is About Regulation, Not Just Supply: Fifteen million homes sit vacant in the United States. Maharawal argues the crisis isn't simply a lack of housing—it's a lack of regulation on the housing we already have. The Abundance argument for deregulation misdiagnoses the problem. When you reframe it, solutions like rent control, community land trusts, and social housing become obvious.•       Anti-Eviction Activism Offers a Model for This Moment: The movement grew out of Occupy, as activists found themselves moving evicted friends out of the city every weekend. A small group of dedicated people built community, combated the deep alienation that eviction creates, and fought to keep each other in their homes. Some of them are still there. In a time of political hopelessness, these are concrete examples of things that worked. About the GuestManissa Maharawal is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., and the author of Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco. She is a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and has previously written about the Occupy movement and housing justice in the San Francisco Bay Area.ReferencesPrevious Keen On episodes mentioned:•       Ida Susser on the Yellow Vests and the battle for democracy in France•       Patrick Markee on homelessness in the New Gilded Age•       Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on Abundance and the housing crisisAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: The housing crisis in the Bay Area (01:46) - Anti-Eviction and the colonization metaphor (04:16) - "It's just the market" — is that a credible argument? (06:12) - Things could be different: contesting gentrification (07:34) - Has San Francisco's government helped or hurt? (10:07) - Rent control: the policy nobody will pass (12:20) - The Abundance debate and the split on the left (15:08) - Misdiagnosing the housing crisis: regulation, not just supply (16:47) - Governo...

"You can't wear a yellow vest on a demonstration anymore because you get arrested as soon as the police see you." — Ida SusserIn November 2018, something strange happened in France. People from the urban periphery—truck drivers, nurses, teachers, plumbers—drove seven or eight hours to Paris wearing yellow safety vests. They weren't students. They weren't union members. They weren't organized by any political party. They were furious about a diesel tax, but really about something deeper: decades of disinvestment, cut services, shuttered bakeries, and a government that had abandoned them.Anthropologist Ida Susser spent years studying this spontaneous movement for her new book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. Like so many other observers, Susser sought to identify them on the traditional left/right political spectrum. The uncomfortable truth, she discovered, is that many had never voted. Many didn't care about consistent ideology. They mixed and matched political ideology, bricolage-style. Marine Le Pen tried to claim them. So did Mélenchon on the far left. Neither succeeded. The Yellow Vests didn't want either fascist or communist leaders.Theoretical comparisons with MAGA and the Tea Party are tempting. We find the same rage, the same economic disinvestment, same feeling of political abandonment. But, for Susser, there's a crucial difference. The Tea Party was mostly an astroturf movement—manufactured by economic and political elites. The Yellow Vests, in contrast, are authentically grassroots. And these days, in Macron's France, you can't even wear a yellow vest on the street without getting arrested. So an incredulous Susser watched a 75-year-old man, innocently going about his business, taken away by police. His crime? That bright vest. Five Takeaways●      They Weren't Left or Right—At Least Not Initially: The Yellow Vests didn't come with a consistent ideology. Many had never voted. They mixed and matched political ideology, bricolage-style. Marine Le Pen tried to claim them. So did Mélenchon on the far left. Neither succeeded. The Yellow Vests didn't want either fascist or communist leaders.●      The Diesel Tax Was the Trigger, Not the Cause: The real issue was decades of disinvestment in rural France. Trains cut. Buses cut. Schools moved further away. Bakeries and post offices shuttered. People had to drive everywhere—then the government taxed their diesel. Macron became enemy number one. They called him Jupiter. They called him king.●      MAGA Comparison Is Apt—But There's a Key Difference: Same rage, same abandoned communities, same sense that elites have forgotten them. But the Tea Party was mostly an astroturf movement—channeled by economic and political elites. The Yellow Vests, in contrast, are genuinely grassroots.●      They Refuse Leadership on Principle: The Yellow Vests are part of a horizontalist movement going back to the World Social Forum. They write their messages on their backs. They won't name leaders. Susser didn't put a single name in her book—they wouldn't allow it. With surveillance cameras everywhere, it's also safer not to be known.●      You Can't Wear a Yellow Vest in France Anymore: An incredulous Susser watched a 75-year-old man standing quietly get taken away by police for wearing one. The other man without a vest was left alone. The movement lives on in the pension strikes, in the songs, in the rage. But the vest itself has become a crime. About the GuestIda Susser is an anthropologist at the City University of New York and the author of The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. She has previously conducted research in South Africa and on urban poverty in the United States.ReferencesPrevious Keen On episodes mentioned:●      Charles Derber on progressive populism●      Hélène Landemore on deliberative democracy and citizen assemblies●      Christopher Clark on Revolutionary Spring and 1848 (upcoming)About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:

"He's blundered here. He's trying to set policy for the government on the use of AI through a sales contract." — Keith Teare on Dario AmodeiThere's only one story this week: Dario Amodei's refusal to let the Department of War use Anthropic's best technology for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Silicon Valley rallied behind him. The New York Times covered it. Sam Altman publicly supported him—while quietly cutting his own deal with the administration. But Keith Teare thinks Anthropic is wrong.Keith's argument is simple: vendors don't set policy. If you want to sell to governments, you can't then dictate what they do with your product. That's not your job. And by trying to do it, Amodei has alienated the entire US administration and created a fake battle that can only damage his company. Andrew is more sympathetic. In his view, Amodei is taking a political position against Trump—and in 2026, with Congress marginalized and corporations increasingly powerful, that's just the nature of things.The debate cuts to something deeper: the power shift between corporations and the state. Oppenheimer couldn't say no to the government because he worked for them. Amodei can say no because he doesn't. These companies now speak to the government as almost equals. Meanwhile, Citruni Research released a white paper predicting AI will collapse the economy and destroy white-collar jobs. Jack Dorsey just cut 40% of Square's workforce. The stock jumped 25%. Five Takeaways●      Keith: Amodei Has Blundered: Vendors don't determine the use of what you buy from them. By trying to set policy through a sales contract, Amodei has alienated the entire US administration and created a fake battle that can only damage his company. He hasn't read the Art of War.●      Andrew: This Is a Political Stand: Amodei isn't naive—he's taking a position against Trump. And in 2026, with Congress marginalized and corporations increasingly powerful, the fact that he's willing to take the government on publicly is astonishing. He's kept his job. The investors are fine with it.●      The Power Has Shifted: Oppenheimer couldn't say no to the government because he worked for them. Amodei can say no because he doesn't. What Anthropic has at its fingertips is not something the government has. These companies now speak to the government as almost equals.●      Silicon Valley Is Split: Right libertarians are small-government supporters of the administration. Left libertarians are bigger-government supporters of welfare. Vinod Khosla is a hybrid—pro-America militarily, fearful of China. Tim Cook does whatever governments tell him. NVIDIA is navigating best.●      Jack Dorsey Cut 40%—Stock Jumped 25%: Citruni Research released a white paper predicting AI will collapse the economy. Noah Smith called it a scary bedtime story. But Dorsey just did it for real at Square. If AI succeeds, lots of white-collar jobs go. The social contract between capital and labor is breaking. About the GuestKeith Teare is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and publisher of That Was The Week, a weekly tech newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and has been a fixture in Silicon Valley for decades.ReferencesThis week's reading:●      Ezra Klein's interview with Jack Clark — Andrew calls it the interview of the week.●      Citruni Research white paper — The AI jobs apocalypse scenario that crashed the software market on Monday.●      Noah Smith's response — Calls the Citruni report a "scary bedtime story."Previous Keen On episodes mentioned:●      Maya Kornberg on Congress being "Stuck" (Episode 2815)●      Arne Westad on pre-WWI parallels (upcoming)About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:

Hold on to your hats!   My featured guest for this episode of Necronomicast is Dr. Rizwan Virk! A graduate of MIT and Stanford, Rizwan Virk is a successful entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist, computer scientist and bestselling author. Virk recently finished his doctoral research at the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) and teaching classes on the Metaverse, Innovation and Simulation Theory at the College of Global Futures and the Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. His books include The Simulation Hypothesis, Startup Myths & Models: What You Won't Learn in Business School, Wisdom of a Yogi, The Simulated Multiverse, Treasure Hunt and Zen Entrepreneurship.   Virk founded Play Labs @ MIT, a startup accelerator, and invested in many successful startups including Discord, Theta Labs, Upland and Tapjoy.  His startups created video games played by millions, including Tap Fish and games based on Game of Thrones, Star Trek, The Walking Dead, Grimm and Penny Dreadful. Virk and his books have been featured on The Joe Rogan Podcast, in Forbes, The Telegraph, NBC News, vox.com, Techcrunch, Inc., VentureBeat, Digital Trends, BBC Science Focus, and Scientific American, CBS, the CBC, Coast to Coast AM and The History Channel.  He has been a speaker and mentor ranging from MIT's $100k Business Plan Competition and Delta V accelerator to 500 Startups, Talks @ Google and GamesBeat in Silicon Valley. Follow him @rizcambridge, and at zenentrepreneur.com. "The Simulation Hypothesis" at Amazon. Support the Necronomicast and "Buy Me A Coffee"!

"He lied more than I thought he did—and I thought he lied a lot." — Tom Wells on Henry KissingerIn our Epstein age, everyone seems to have access to everyone else's dirtiest secrets. But half a century ago, in the Watergate era, it was harder to get one's hands on the secret files, phone calls and other private data. But historian Tom Wells has done exactly that with the private phone calls of Henry Kissinger. Wells' new book, The Kissinger Tapes, is based on transcripts of Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations—recordings he made primarily for his memoirs and to keep track of what he told to whom.Wells came to the project as a Kissinger critic but found himself respecting certain things about him: particularly his stamina, the work ethic and political skills. What Wells didn't expect was to discover that Kissinger lied even more than most of us assume. Especially about Vietnam and Cambodia. The most damning revelation is his callousness. Kissinger reveled in body counts, Wells reports. He even supported American planes indiscriminately bombing Vietnam so as to hit something. Anything. Anyone.So was Kissinger evil? Or was he, to borrow from Arendt's account of the Adolf Eichmann trial, banal? Whereas Eichmann might have been following orders, Henry Kissinger was following his own career. One was an efficient bureaucrat, the other a supreme networker. Neither had any sensitivity to human suffering. Five Takeaways●      He Lied More Than Expected: Wells came to the project already critical of Kissinger. But going through the transcripts, he discovered Kissinger lied even more than he'd assumed. About the secret wiretaps of government officials and journalists. About the false reporting system for the Cambodia bombing. He kept saying he didn't know anything, had nothing to do with it. He did.●      The Callousness Is Stunning: Nixon and Kissinger reveled in body counts. Nixon said, "I don't care about the civilian casualties." During the Laos invasion, he said he didn't even care if they lost 10,000 South Vietnamese troops. Kissinger remarked that if American planes just dropped bombs out the door without aiming, they'd have to hit something. This wasn't indifference. It was gratification.●      Morality Was Not Part of the Calculation: Kissinger saw most conflicts through the lens of U.S.-Soviet rivalry. The balance of power mattered. The human cost didn't. They secretly armed the Pakistani military during the Bangladesh genocide—between 300,000 and 3 million dead—because they needed Pakistan as a channel to China. The opening to Beijing was more important than the slaughter.●      He Was Supremely Two-Faced: Kissinger was always deferential to Nixon's face, always addressed him as "Mr. President." Behind his back, he said nasty things. He trashed Secretary of State William Rogers constantly. He and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird were rivals, both master leakers, both devious. They came to respect each other for it.●      Evil or Banal?: Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil after covering the Eichmann trial. Some apply that framework to Kissinger. But there's a difference. Eichmann was following orders. Kissinger was following his career. One was an efficient bureaucrat. The other a supreme networker. Neither had any sensitivity to human suffering. About the GuestTom Wells is a historian and the author of The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam. He is based in New Mexico.ReferencesBooks mentioned:●      The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations by Tom Wells — his new book based on transcripts of Kissinger's phone recordings.●      Zbig: The Man Who Cracked the Kremlin by Edward Luce — biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger's rival.People mentioned:●      Hannah Arendt wrote about "the banality of evil" while covering the Eichmann trial—a framework some apply to Kissinger.●      Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers; his son's book Truth and Consequences is discussed next week on the show.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: The age of Epstein vs. the age of Kissinger (01:31) - Why did Kissinger secretly record his calls? (02:54) - Did you come to this as a Kissinger hater? (05:43) - He lied more than I thought he did (06:08) - Breaking news: The callousness (07:47) - Realpolitik vs. indifference to human suffering (09:47) - Did Kissinger recognize moral critics? (11:06) - What kind of man was Kissinger? (14:18) - His relationship with Nixon (15:15) - Who did Kissinger trust? (16:40) - His private life and playboy reputation (19:00) - What the tapes reveal about Vietnam (20:56) - Did he care about American casualties? (22:19) - The monstrous quality (24:20) - Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil (25:52) - What the Kissinger tapes tell us about Trump (27:31) - What would Kissinger make of Ukraine and Gaza?

The Friday Five for February 27, 2026: [01:02] ☕Starbucks Spring 2026 Menu  [02:45]

"They are fundamentally bound at the hip, because the Trump age is a conspiratorial age and a backlash against global wealth inequality... Epstein facilitated the rise of Trump." — Jason PackLate last year, Disorder podcast host Jason Pack came on the show and predicted that Mark Carney would be the "orderer" of 2025 and Jeffrey Epstein would be 2026's "disorderer-in-chief". Pack was uncannily right. Although, as he admits, such prescience gives him no pleasure.Pack is no conspiracist. He thought QAnon was a hoax; he saw the antisemitism baked into its bizarre theories. But he's come to believe there was a genuine cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein case—not orchestrated by the CIA, but by prosecutors who didn't want to go after powerful people, journalists comfortably ensconced in Epstein's world, and a system where too much wealth has accrued to too narrow a sliver of global elites.What haunts him most is what the emails reveal about how the world actually works. Favors exchanged for favors in a network of infinite back-scratching. Noam Chomsky (!) and Leon Black busy trading intros for access to Epstein's underworld. The emails reveal completely amoral elites, Pack says, nihilists without even the pretense of moral scruples.Trump and Epstein, Pack argues, are bound at the hip—not because Trump is guilty of Epstein's crimes, but because both are products of the same angry backlash against global wealth inequality and the collapse of institutional trust. Trump is, in Pack's memorable phrase, "a legal Epstein"—someone who gets things done through connections, who can appear the most elite Wall Street type to bankers and the most common man to coal miners. The evil genius of doppelgängerism. For Pack, the Epstein files may be a tremor before the big one—AI or crypto could bring the real 1789 style earthquake—but they've already destroyed something of priceless value: the illusion that elites are working on the behalf of the people. Five Takeaways●      The Cover-Up Wasn't a Conspiracy—It Was the System: Cases sat on prosecutors' desks in Florida in 2003 and weren't filed. Journalists were tipped off in the early 2000s and didn't run with it. Pack isn't alleging CIA orchestration—just that too much wealth and power had accrued to too narrow a tranche of global elites, and they were able to cow journalists and prosecutors into silence.●      Trump and Epstein Are Bound at the Hip: Both are products of the same backlash against global wealth inequality and the collapse of trust since the end of the Cold War. The irony: Trump is himself a member of the elite who benefited from these networks, but his political appeal lies in his promise to dismantle them.●      "Order" vs. the Law of the Jungle: The world Epstein built wasn't ordered in any traditional sense—it was the logic of the jungle, based on blackmail and compromat. Russian intelligence running a financial sex trafficking influence scheme at the heart of the Anglo-American establishment. When they needed a service, they got the service.●      The Collapse of Social Trust: Pack contrasts our "low-trust" Anglo-American society with Scandinavian models where people still believe institutions work on their behalf. The Epstein files reveal completely amoral elites who believed in nothing—no religion, no moral code—and had no compunction about harming young women or stealing pensioners' money.●      A Tremor Before the Big One: Epstein won't bring down neoliberal capitalism. But AI making five families wealthier than the rest of the world combined could. Or crypto going to zero and 300,000 people realizing their life savings are gone. The true significance of the Epstein files is that they've stripped away the illusion that the system works on our behalf. About the GuestJason Pack is a historian, consultant, and host of the Disorder podcast. He is the author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder. He is based in London.ReferencesPodcasts mentioned:●      Disorder Episode 167 — "Epstein Survivor Rina Oh on Getting Justice"●      Disorder Episode 168 — "How Can Epstein's Victims Get Closure? with Civil Rights Attorney Lisa Bloom"●      Bobby Capucci's "Jeffrey Epstein: The Cover-Up Chronicles" — deep dives into the Epstein files●      Jewish Currents — left-wing Jewish treatment of Epstein's connections to Ehud Barak and the MossadPrevious Keen On episodes mentioned:●      Peter Bale interview (Episode 2813) — discussed the Epstein media cover-up and Michael Wolff's attempts to interest mainstream mediaAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: Jason Pack hates being right (02:04) - Carney's Davos speech: Words as actions (05:44) - A Canadian-led initiative on Ukraine? (06:55) - The Epstein cover-up: Why I believe it (11:05) - What the New York Times knew and when (13:21) - Epstein survivors and their lawyers (15:06) - Too much wealth has accrued to too narrow a tranche (17:09) - The uncomfortable Jewish angle (21:03) - Emails to Woody Allen and Leon Botstein (23:00) - Trump and Epstein: Bound at the hip (27:03) - Trump as a legal Epstein (29:33) - Disorder or the law of the jungle? (33:28) - Does Scandinavia get off lighter? (38:05) - A tremor before the big one?

Microsoft just dropped patches for SIX actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities — and that's just the beginning. In this week's Hacking News, we break down the February 2026 Patch Tuesday emergency, North Korea's Lazarus Group poisoning npm and PyPI through fake job recruiters, nation-state hackers weaponizing Google's Gemini AI (including malware that writes its own payloads), a massive Dutch telecom breach affecting 6.2 million people, and a U.S. government contractor breach that ballooned from 4 million to potentially tens of millions affected. This is Exploit Brokers by Forgebound Research — cybersecurity news, threat intelligence, and insights. Whether you're a security analyst, developer, or just someone who wants to stay informed, this episode has something for you.

"The House hasn't reorganized committee jurisdictions since the early 70s—before the internet existed." — Maya KornbergAmerica is stuck stuck stuck stuck. Almost exactly a year ago, I interviewed the Atlantic's Yoni Applebaum about Stuck, his influential critique of the housing crisis. Now we have another Stuck—this one by Maya Kornberg, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Only her subtitle is about Congress, not housing: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress.This is, Kornberg argues, one of the toughest times in modern American history to sit in Congress. Members are forced to spend most of their time making fundraising calls. They face record-high threats against themselves and their families. And the media incentivizes spectacle over policymaking—what she describes as "Kings and Prophets"—where members have the power of the megaphone but not the power to drive legislation.One fact captures Congressional stuckness: The House hasn't reorganized its committee jurisdictions since the early 1970s—before the internet existed. Half the Senate, then, questioned Mark Zuckerberg because no single committee is responsible for tech. Not even mad libertarians like Elon Musk could make that one up.Kornberg recently ran for New York City Council in Park Slope and, as a friend of Israel, discovered firsthand how media latches onto the most salacious angle. That said, she's not giving up on Congress. Kornberg is hopeful that a fresh wave of reformers, like the Watergate babies of '74 or the class of 2018, can unstick it. But she is, nonetheless, clear-eyed about what we're facing: a four-alarm fire for our democracy. Five Takeaways●      This Is the Hardest Moment in Modern History to Be in Congress: Members face astronomical campaign costs, record-high threats and violence against themselves and their families, and a leadership-driven system that has stripped rank-and-file members of real power to drive legislation.●      Money, Media, and Violence Keep Congress Stuck: Members spend every mealtime making fundraising calls. They pay "dues" to the party just to get on good committees. Media incentivizes spectacle over policymaking. And threats against members have risen year after year.●      Congress Hasn't Reorganized Since Before the Internet: The House hasn't reorganized committee jurisdictions since the early 1970s. Half the Senate questions Mark Zuckerberg because no single committee is responsible for tech. When everyone's responsible, no one is.●      More Chairmen Named Mike Than Women Committee Leaders: The pay-to-play system in Congress disadvantages women, communities of color, working-class Americans, and young Americans—anyone who faces greater barriers to fundraising faces greater barriers to power.●      Waves of Reformers Can Unstick Congress: The Watergate babies of '74, the Republican Revolution of '94, the class of 2018—frustrated reformers have reshaped Congress before. The midterms could bring another wave, if the public frustration is deep enough. About the GuestMaya Kornberg is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. She holds a PhD from Oxford and is the author of Inside Congressional Committees. She recently ran for New York City Council in Brooklyn's Park Slope.ReferencesBooks mentioned:●      Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress by Maya Kornberg — her new book on why Congress is stuck and how to unstick it.●      Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Applebaum — on the housing crisis, interviewed on this show a year ago.●      Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman — on who killed progress and how to bring it back.People mentioned:●      Henry Waxman served four decades in Congress and passed landmark health and environmental legislation even under Reagan.●      Lauren Underwood came to Congress in 2018 and co-founded the Black Maternal Health Caucus after losing a friend who died after childbirth.●      Hélène Landemore is a Yale political theorist who advocates for citizen assemblies as an alternative to representative democracy.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: America is stuck (02:04) - Why everyone woke up to this problem at once (03:49) - Why study Congress? Is it boring? (06:33) - Money, media, and violence (07:11) - Congressional chameleons: Waxman, Underwood, Andy Kim (10:24) - Is this bipartisan? (12:37) - The crummiest job in Washington (15:53) - Money: 'I spend every mealtime making fundraising calls' (17:29) - Should Congress get a pay raise? (19:53) - Media and the Gaza third rail (23:14) - Kings and Prophets: Spectacle over policy (25:32) - Can Congress stand up to Trump? (27:43) - Congress is woefully unprepared to regulate tech (31:54) - Gerontocracy: More Mikes than women (37:34) - Can citiz...

FOLLOW UP: JUDGE UPHOLDS HUGE AWARD AGAINST TESLAIn August 2025 a jury awarded a payout against Tesla of $243 million, for their partial responsibility in a fatal crash where Autopilot was in use. Tesla appealed this but that has been rejected. The expectation is they will appeal again. To read more, click this article link from TechCrunch.EU TO BRING IN RULES BENEFITTING EUROPEAN BUILT EVSThe European Union (EU) is working on legislation that would push for any state subsidies or incentives to be tied to EVs being made in Europe. The likelihood is that a vehicle will have to contain parts, excepting the battery, that have been 70% made in the EU. If you wish to learn more, click this electrive article link here.The news has caused concern in the UK, as this would mean cars made here would not meet the criteria for state incentives. You can read about this by clicking the link here from Modern Diplomacy.RENAULT TAKES FULL CONTROL OF FLEXISRenault has now taken full control of the electric light commercial vehicle company it created a joint-venture with Volvo Group and CMA CGM to form. Renault has agreed to buy out the 55% that the two other partners held, but the Volvo Group will remain a ‘strategic partner'. For more on this story, click this electrive link here.AUDI GETS A NEW CTOGeoffrey Bouquot is leaving Audi and his role as Chief Technology Officer, after only a year. He will be replaced by Rouven Mohr, who is Lamborghini's CTO, to become Head of Technical Development. The wording of the electrive article is quite interesting, you can see more for yourself by clicking this link here.STAGECOACH BRINGS MORE EBUSES TO DEVONStagecoach is bringing 110 electric buses to Devon, working on routes from Tobay, Barnstable and Exeter. Let's hope they have measured the road widths and checked this time! To read more, click this electrive article link here.TFL AWARD RAPID CHARGER CONTRACTTotalEnergies has been awarded the contract for installing 43 rapid charge points across London. These will be a mix of 100 and 200kW power. You can find out more by clicking this electrive article link here.If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCASTNEW NEW CAR NEWS -Omoda 5 SHS-SOmoda are bringing a hybrid version of the 5 model to the UK, from March 2026. Called the 5 SHS-S, which stands for “Super Hybrid System - Hybrid”. Priced at £25,740 this undercuts the Nissan Qasqai by around £5,000. The company makes it clear the electric capability of this is to aid economy and efficiency.

"We didn't have to grow up with that." — Ross Greene, on school shootingsOne of the most persistent worries these days is that our kids aren't okay. With most of the blame, of course, now being placed on the ubiquity of social media. But psychologist Ross W. Greene, author of the bestselling Lost at School, has a new book out today called The Kids Who Aren't Okay which doesn't place all the blame on social media. Indeed he argues that if we focus only on the internet, we'll fail to understand the broader psychological struggle that many of our kids face today.It's not that Greene is in total denial about the destructive nature of social media. But none of his leading reasons for today's crisis in schools are associated with technology. His top three:●      School shootings●      High-stakes testing●      Zero-tolerance policies with a focus on punishment rather than empathyThe new book, Greene impishly promises, has things in it that will offend just about anybody on both the left and right. He calls out teacher unions for failing to support legislation against restraints and seclusions—pinning kids to the ground, dragging them to locked rooms. And he criticizes both parties for bipartisan policies that have made it harder for educators to educate.The definition of good teaching, Greene insists, is meeting every kid where they're at. Standard testing is exactly the opposite. If you try to treat everybody exactly the same, he warns, you will meet nobody where they're at. We need to get busy teaching kids how to collaborate on solving problems, he says—otherwise they'll turn out like us—only worse. Five Takeaways●      Social Media Isn't in the Top Three: Greene's top factors making it harder to be a kid: school shootings, high-stakes testing, and zero-tolerance policies. If we focus only on social media, he says, we'll miss the rest of the picture.●      We're Still Pinning Kids to the Ground: Schools still use restraints and seclusions—pinning kids down, dragging them to locked rooms. Legislation has been available since 2011. The two largest teacher unions have yet to support it.●      High-Stakes Testing Is the Opposite of Good Teaching: Good teaching means meeting every kid where they're at. Telling every kid they have to get over the same bar by the end of the school year is exactly not what the doctor ordered.●      Fairness Means Treating Every Kid Differently: If you try to treat everybody exactly the same, you will meet nobody where they're at. Meeting each kid where they are isn't unfair to the rest—it's fair to everyone.●      This Book Will Offend Just About Anybody: Greene calls out both political parties, teacher unions, and policies on both sides of the aisle. Somebody's got to wade in, he says. Somebody's got to call it. About the GuestRoss W. Greene, PhD is the author of Lost at School and The Explosive Child. He is the founder of the nonprofit Lives in the Balance and the inventor of the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions approach. He has worked with nearly 3,000 kids and their caregivers.ReferencesBooks mentioned:●      The Kids Who Aren't Okay by Ross W. Greene — his new book on reimagining support, belonging, and hope in schools.●      Lost at School by Ross W. Greene — his bestselling earlier work on kids with behavioral challenges.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: The kids who aren't okay (01:17) - Are most kids struggling? (02:51) - Top three factors: Not social media (04:11) - Is this an American problem? (05:15) - Distrust of authorities—even PhDs (06:47) - Which kids are struggling most? (08:04) - Where's the cultural rebellion? (09:55) - Helicopter parenting (11:34) - Wading into the culture wars (13:00) - Restraints and seclusions: We're still pinning kids down (15:10) - Were schools always this punitive? (17:23) - Why teachers are underpaid and leaving (18:57) - Public vs. private schools (19:59) - Is this about money? (21:07) - Every kid is different (24:06) - The problem with 'fairness' (26:27) - Medication: Not black and white (28:34) - Social media: Correlational, not causal (31:54) - What happens to kids who aren't okay?