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A fundamental structural shift underway is the movement of AI from isolated features to operationalized, production-level workloads in MSP tooling and client environments. This transition is not primarily about the capabilities of individual AI models but about their integration into existing operational platforms and workflows. Companies such as PDQ, Senteon, Domotz, and Zoom are incorporating AI agents directly into management layers, endpoint automation, and workflow orchestration, thereby increasing both the scope and complexity of AI impact. The locus of value is shifting from features to workflow control and integration, creating new demands for governance, consumption monitoring, and exit strategies. The most consequential development referenced is the transition in AI billing and operational models from static user or seat licenses to variable, usage-based consumption. He cites TechCrunch's coverage of GitHub Copilot's move to token-based billing and Semafor's reporting of Uber's rapid exhaustion of its 2026 AI budget in four months due to unbounded consumption by generative tools. F5's State of Application Strategy report is referenced to confirm that multi-cloud and parallel model operations are now common, with significant instances of AI-related security incidents already reported. Secondary developments reinforce this structural realignment of risk and accountability. PDQ, for instance, is expanding multi-tenant management and integration capabilities, while Senteon enables endpoint hardening and drift control directly in Rewst's platform. Domotz's MCP server allows AI agents to operate across 40,000 networks globally, and Zoom is packaging AI context protocol features for workflow automation. Each of these changes is designed to increase operational efficiency, but also expand the surface area for unintended consequences, elevated operational complexity, and potential budget overruns. For MSPs and IT leaders, the operational implications center on governance, spend control, and clear accountability over AI-driven tools and workflows. The risk is that without adequate monitoring, policy setting, and contractual clarity—especially around data portability and exit costs—MSPs may face liability for unplanned consumption, misconfigured automation, or governance gaps. The evidence indicates the need to proactively audit AI integrations, set usage thresholds, instrument logging and budgeting controls, and renegotiate vendor contracts to ensure service boundaries and oversight mechanisms are in place before workflows become too deeply embedded. 00:00 MSP Stack Resets  04:09 AI Needs Governance 06:45 Govern AI or Pay 09:22 Why Do We Care?  Supported by:  Nerdio Zero Networks   

This week Joseph speaks to Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch. Zack has been leading coverage into the spouseware or stalkerware industry. This is malware sold to ordinary people, which they then often install on their girlfriend's or someone else's phone. Zack talks about the crazy scope of this problem. Behind the stalkerware network spilling the private phone data of hundreds of thousands Spyzie stalkerware is spying on thousands of Android and iPhone users Stalkerware tag on TechCrunch This Week In Security Newsletter YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/BLb46310iLs Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our 246th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 05/22/2026Hosted 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:Google I/O highlights included Gemini 3.5 (with 3.5 Flash emphasized for speed and benchmarks), the always-on agent Gemini Spark running on Google Cloud with MCP tool support, and Gemini Omni multimodal video generation/editing, plus updates like Anti-Gravity 2.0, Gemini for Science, and Genie world-model navigation using Street View and Waymo simulation.Coding-agent competition accelerated with Cursor Composer 2.5 (fine-tuned on Moonshot's Kimi K2.5) and xAI's early Grok Build release, alongside discussion of potential Cursor–xAI ties and xAI's talent churn and compute utilization concerns.Business and legal updates included Elon Musk losing his OpenAI lawsuit on statute-of-limitations grounds, reported OpenAI–Apple partnership tensions, Anthropic agreeing to a $30B funding round at a $900B valuation and projecting its first profitable quarter, and Cerebras' IPO surging about 90%. Research and safety stories covered OpenAI's result on an 80-year-old Erdős geometry problem, findings on “negation neglect” in training, interpretability work showing multiple redundant circuits per capability, agent benchmarks like Terminal World, new deepfake takedown enforcement under the Take It Down Act, demonstrations of autonomous hacking/self-replication, rapidly improving AI cyber capabilities, and steps toward image provenance metadata and watermarks.Timestamps:(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:01:15) News PreviewTools & Apps(00:05:05) Google unveils AI model Gemini 3.5 and AI agent Gemini Spark(00:11:43) Google's Gemini Omni turns images, audio, and text into video — and that's just the start | TechCrunch(00:17:27) Google launches Antigravity 2.0 with an updated desktop app and CLI tool at IO 2026 | TechCrunch(00:22:35) Google Debuts AI-Powered Tools To Optimize Scientific Research Workflows(00:27:20) Google's Genie world model can now simulate real streets with Street View | TechCrunch(00:29:51) Cursor's Composer 2.5 matches Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 benchmarks at a fraction of the cost(00:37:37) xAI Introduces Its Coding Agent Called Grok BuildApplications & Business(00:41:55) Musk loses OpenAI court battle as he waited too long to sue(00:48:08) Anthropic agrees terms of $30bn funding deal at $900bn valuation(00:53:12) OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team | TechCrunch(00:56:49) Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI's Products in Latest Shake-Up | WIRED(00:58:15) OpenAI-Apple Partnership Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight - Bloomberg(01:01:13) AI chipmaker Cerebras soars 90% in year's biggest IPO so farResearch & Advancements(01:07:10) AI just solved an 80-year-old ‘Erdős problem,' and mathematicians are amazed | Scientific American(01:11:50) Negation Neglect: When models fail to learn negations in training(01:13:18) All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs(01:16:20) Autonomous AI research for nanogpt speedrun(01:21:59) TerminalWorld: Benchmarking Agents on Real-World Terminal TasksPolicy & Safety(01:23:15) America's dangerous, messy deepfakes crackdown is here | The Verge(01:25:17) Language Models Can Autonomously Hack and Self-Replicate(01:28:48) How fast is autonomous AI cyber capability advancing?(01:31:32) Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human FlourishingSynthetic Media & Art(01:33:15) OpenAI is making it easier to check if an image was made by their models | TechCrunch(01:33:56) How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines | MIT Technology ReviewSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Podcast: Smashing Security (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)Episode: High-speed train hacks and homicidal lawnmowersPub date: 2026-05-20Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationA 23-year-old radio enthusiast spent £300 on a piece of kit from the internet, and used it to bring four packed high-speed trains to a screeching halt. His defence in court? Possibly the most creative excuse we've heard all year.Meanwhile, owners of $4,000 robot lawnmowers are discovering that their gadget can be hijacked over the internet, redirected at journalists who foolishly lie down in front of it, and used to harvest Wi-Fi passwords, email addresses, and GPS coordinates. Change the default password? Sure - until the next firmware update silently resets it back.Plus - don't miss our featured interview with XBOW's Brendan Dolan-Gavitt about how AI is transforming penetration testing.All this and more in episode 468 of the "Smashing Security" podcast with cybersecurity expert and keynote speaker Graham Cluley, and special guest Geoff White.EPISODE LINKS:Open source tool maker Grafana Labs says hackers stole its code, refuses to pay ransom - TechCrunch.Man accused of stealing Beyoncé's unreleased music takes guilty plea - ABC News.Shai-Hulud code drop: Open season for supply chain attacks- ReversingLabs.Student hacked Taiwan high-speed rail to trigger emergency brakes - BleepingComputer.Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network - The Register.The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland's Railway System - WIRED.The man with an army of Yarbo robot lawn mowers - The Verge.Ever been run over by a robot? I have - for science! - TikTok.RD280UA 28” WQXGA BenQ Programming Monitor with Backlight and Flexible Arm - BenQ.Kai Shun DM-0708 combination sharpening stone, grain 300/1000 - Knives and Tools.AI-Assisted ICS Attack on a Water Utility - Dragos.Adversaries Leverage AI for Vulnerability Exploitation, Augmented Operations, and Initial Access - Google Cloud Blog.Smashing Security merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers and stuff)SPONSORS:Vanta - Expand the scope of your security program with market-leading compliance automation… while saving time and money. Smashing Security listeners get $1000 off!XBOW - The autonomous offensive security platform that helps security teams scale. Start a pentest today.OPSWAT - Read Benny Czarny's book, "Cybersecurity Upside Down", to rethink how you protect your organization from file-based threats, including those powered by AI.SUPPORT THE SHOW:Tell your friends and colleagues about “Smashing Security”, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.Become a supporter! Join Smashing Security PLUS via Patreon or Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes on our early-release feed!FOLLOW THE SHOW:Follow us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or on the Smashing Security subreddit, and visit our website for more episodes.THANKS:Theme tune: "Vinyl Memories" by Mikael Manvelyan.Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Graham Cluley, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Google I/O 2026 was this week and Google unveiled a new Gemini search tool allowing you to add images and video to your search query. TechCrunch says “Google Search as you know it is over”, we discuss what that means. Plus Warby Parker worked with Google and Samsung on new smart glasses that were also announced at Google I/O. Is the smart wearables market big enough for another entrant? And we end the week with a weighty debate. Starring Sarah Lane, Tom Merritt, Robb Dunewood, Nica Montford, Len Peralta, Roger Chang, Joe. To read the show notes click here! Support the show on Patreon by becoming a supporter!

“The rules-based system just hasn't worked. China's system is so opaque that you can't see the subsidies. And when you've got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you've got two of the world's biggest actors who aren't on board.” — Soumaya Keynes It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump's trade war. But in the long run, we're all dead — even old Maynard. So instead, we found his great-great-niece, Soumaya Keynes — Financial Times columnist and co-author of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy. Having already appeared on Jon Stewart this week, Soumaya has a bit of Keynesian star quality about her. But she's also a first-rate economist. Her thesis is that the old rules-based trading system that her great-great-uncle helped design after World War II is gone. And it ain't coming back. China's subsidies are so opaque that rules can't be written to constrain them, let alone enforced. The US is no longer willing to submit to a referee. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. So — now what? Keynes says we must think like a trade warrior. Donald Trump should leverage the tools available — but use them strategically. Trump's error in his second term was not being tough on China while being too tough on everyone else, especially allies like Canada and Mexico. Soumaya Keynes' most contemporary idea might be her most Keynesian one. John Maynard Keynes proposed penalties for countries running large trade surpluses as well as those running deficits — recognising that global imbalances are a two-sided problem. That idea didn't make it into the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Eighty years later, in equally anxious economic times, his optimistic great-great-niece is reviving it. Five Takeaways •       Can Trade Wars Be Won? Yes, Sometimes: The conventional wisdom: no one wins a trade war. Keynes and Bown agree — in theory. In practice, countries in a weaker position cave. History has examples: France in the late nineteenth century told its trading partners they were renegotiating treaties, and the smaller partners complied. Trump's tariffs in his first term produced concessions. The problem is not that trade wars can't be won. It's that the smaller power's only defence — coordinating with other smaller powers — is extremely hard to sustain. There's always an incentive to cut a deal first. •       China Is the Doper on the Sports Field: Keynes's sharpest analogy: the global trading system is like a sports game that needs rules to ensure a level playing field. China's subsidies — cheap credit, corporate handouts, opaque support for state-linked companies — are the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that unlike doping in sport, China's subsidies are invisible. You can write a rule saying China won't give these handouts. But you can't verify compliance. And without enforcement, rules are meaningless. The WTO has not solved this. Nothing has solved this. •       Trump Was Right About China, Wrong About Everything Else: Keynes is careful here. She credits Robert Lighthizer in Trump's first term with identifying China as the real problem and building a focused strategy. In the second term, Trump put tariffs on everyone simultaneously — which dissipated leverage, alienated the coalition of allies needed to pressure Beijing, and mixed up the problem of China's subsidies with grievances against Canada, Mexico, and the EU. If you were genuinely tough on China, you wouldn't have put tariffs on everyone. You would have been more targeted. •       The Rules-Based System Is Gone and Isn't Coming Back: Why can't we return to the system Keynes's great-great-uncle helped build? Two reasons. China's subsidies are too opaque to write enforceable rules against. And the US has lost confidence in any international referee — a long and complex story, but the result is that America won't submit to neutral adjudication. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. Yearning for the old approach is not an option. A new strategy is needed — and that's what the book is about. •       AI and the Next Trade War: Services: AI is central to the US-China conflict already — chip restrictions, military advantage, economic supremacy. But Keynes's less-noticed observation: AI could fundamentally reshape international services trade. The UK, for example, is a massive services exporter — finance, legal, consulting, accounting. If AI eliminates demand for those services, the UK faces a new current account crisis, new trade tensions, a new wave of economic conflict. Nobody knows how this plays out. Which is why, she suggests, the tools in the book will remain relevant for longer than the current tariff cycle. About the Guests Soumaya Keynes is an economics columnist at the Financial Times and host of The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. Before joining the FT she spent eight years at The Economist. She co-founded the Trade Talks podcast with Chad Bown during Trump's first term. Chad P. Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Chief Economist at the US State Department under President Biden. Together they are the authors of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). References: •       How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy by Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). •       Soumaya Keynes on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, May 19, 2026 — referenced in the interview. •       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on America's strategic distractions from the China problem. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouT...

The Arlington, Virginia-based startup has raised $42 million to equip ships with sensors that blow the current AIS tech out of the water. Also, NanoCo, the company behind OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, has raised a $12 million seed after a viral launch, the founders tell TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if the darkest chapter of your life turned out to be the very thing that saved it? Sean Clayton is a serial entrepreneur, marketing expert, and founder of Myosin and Mindful Ventures. He has helped bring nine brands to exit totaling over a billion dollars through direct-to-consumer marketing. Today, he is building AI-first marketing products, investing in over 30 companies, and teaching people how to unlock their highest self through integrated spirituality and radical inner work. In this conversation on The Greatness Machine, Darius and Sean dig into one of the most remarkable origin stories you'll hear on this show. Sean opens up about childhood sexual abuse and the deep wounds it left behind, the people-pleasing and affirmation-seeking patterns it created, and the moment he tried to end his life before everything fell apart. He shares how a federal conviction and nearly three years behind bars paradoxically became the turning point that broke a cycle that could have killed him, and how he rebuilt his life from the ground up, starting at a car dealership in a halfway house with $200 in ads and a hunger to prove the world wrong. Sean also shares the spiritual framework he now teaches through the Miracle Academy, including how to get in communion with your inner child, why everything happening outside of you is simply a feedback loop of your internal world, how to recognize and create from life's patterns, and what it truly means to stop efforting through life and start walking in greatness. In this episode, Darius and Sean will discuss: (00:00) Welcome to The Greatness Machine (02:56) Sean Clayton's Journey in Marketing (05:45) Overcoming Adversity: Sean's Personal Story (08:31) The Impact of Criminal Charges on Life (11:35) Navigating the Prison System (14:06) Lessons Learned and Marketing Success (17:12) The Future of Marketing and AI (21:20) From Harvard to Houston: A Journey of Rebellion (28:05) Navigating Corporate Challenges: The Rise and Fall of Innovations (36:02) Transforming Trauma: Finding Purpose Through Pain (41:41) The Gift of Trauma: Testing Worthiness and Growth (44:10) The Influence of the Inner Child (46:49) Aligning with Your Higher Self (50:01) Miracles of Life and Purpose (01:03:14) Embodiment and Self-Truth Sean Clayton is a visionary entrepreneur and marketing expert with a rare ability to blend data-driven strategy with human-centered storytelling. He is the founder of Myosin, a full-service growth marketing accelerator, and has helped bring nine brands to exit totaling over a billion dollars in value through direct-to-consumer marketing. His work spans venture growth, regenerative health, Web3 user acquisition, and holistic well-being, with notable partnerships alongside industry giants like Lionsgate, Sony, and Fox. Previously serving as Chief Solution Officer at WPP, Sean has built sustainable growth infrastructures for some of the world's leading brands. He is also the creator of the Miracle Academy, a platform dedicated to integrated spirituality, emotional freedom, and personal transformation. A recognized speaker and thought leader, Sean's insights have been featured in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and Martech Series. His life and career are a testament to what becomes possible when business acumen meets deep inner work. Connect with Sean: Website: https://www.themiracleacademy.com/  Website: https://myosin.io/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Abundance10000  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abundance10000/  Connect with Darius: Website: https://therealdarius.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmirshahzadeh/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imthedarius/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Thegreatnessmachine  Book: The Core Value Equation https://www.amazon.com/Core-Value-Equation-Framework-Limitless/dp/1544506708 Write a review for The Greatness Machine using this link: https://ratethispodcast.com/spreadinggreatness.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only question, a big question, is how do you eat?” — Keith Teare Does capitalism have a future in our AI age? For Musk, Silicon Valley's baddest bad entrepreneur, the answer might surprise. Musk seems to think that in the long run, money and wealth will disappear in an age of abundant intelligence. Which, presumably, will include hundreds of billions of his own dollars. Although given Musk's determination to sue and take money from OpenAI, some might be slightly sceptical of his real faith in a post-money cornucopia. It's not just Musk and That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare who are reimagining capitalism in our AI age. The former World Bank chief economist, Branko Milanovic, drawing on Karl Marx and Adam Smith in equal measure, argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, things will become free — thereby creating the conditions for the destruction of capitalism. Keith agrees — and goes further than Milanovic. The end of paid labor, he insists, borrowing also from Marx, is not a catastrophe. It's the end of what he calls “paid slavery” and the opening of genuine freedom. I'm not so sure. If nobody has to work, we'll all become bad artists. The cult of the amateur. The future is of bad entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and even worse artists. Hyper-capitalism in our age of AI. Five Takeaways •       The Musk-OpenAI Trial: A Big Yawn That Cost Millions: An Oakland jury rejected Elon Musk's claim against OpenAI in under two hours — not because OpenAI didn't do what Musk alleged, but because the statute of limitations had expired. Someone should have caught this before two weeks of trial. Musk has vowed to appeal, but it's hard to see how you get around a statute of limitations. Keith's verdict: sideshow, big yawn, ego contest. The lawyers won. The real question — who owns OpenAI after it converts to for-profit — was never going to be answered here. •       Sam Altman's Credibility Problem: The New York Times took five takeaways from the trial, one of which was that Sam Altman has a credibility problem. Keith's response: not new information. What the trial did reveal is the depth of mutual animosity between Musk and Altman — two people who, despite everything, share more beliefs about where AI is going than almost anyone else in the world. Keith on who he'd back in a Stalin vs Hitler choice: Stalin, 100 times out of 100. Which is not to say he's enthusiastic about either. •       Krugman on Europe: Right Analysis, Wrong Conclusion: Paul Krugman, touring Europe, argues that GDP per capita understates European quality of life. A third of US income buys more than a third of US lifestyle in Europe — healthcare, education, travel, housing are all significantly cheaper. Keith agrees with the analysis. His counter: Europe's structural hostility to innovation means it can maintain its lifestyle but not grow it. The social democratic model is sustainable until it isn't. It needs to unlock innovation or it will slowly fall behind. Hard to do when you're spending your time writing regulations. •       Milanovic's AI Thesis: When Things Are Free: Branko Milanovic — Marxist and neoclassical economist — argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, value in the classical Adam Smith/Ricardo/Marx sense disappears, and things approach free. Keith agrees and goes further: this isn't just Marxist logic, it's classical economics. The organic composition of capital. If variable capital — mostly labor — tends toward zero, costs tend toward zero, prices tend toward zero, and the distinction between capitalism and its opposite dissolves. Musk says the same thing. Agree or disagree, it's the most interesting economic argument of our time. •       The End of Paid Labor Is the End of Paid Slavery: Keith's most provocative position. The end of paid labor is not something to fear. It is freedom — the opening up of genuine choice about how to spend your time. What remains are human-to-human activities: care work, travel companionship, live music, the masseur. These will be in demand. They just won't constitute most of what 8 billion people do. The question of how the previously employed population participates in society — eats, lives, has purpose — is real and large. Keith's position: it's not an inconceivable problem. Andrew's counter: if nobody has to work, we'll all become bad artists. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Branko Milanovic, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism from a Marxist and Neoclassical Point of View,” Substack. •       Paul Krugman, “Is Europe in Economic Decline?” The New York Times / Substack. •       Episode 2910: Keith Teare and Jonathan Rauch on AI — the preceding special edition, directly referenced. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:  

“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that maps today have lost, because today maps are so functional, so utilitarian.” — Peter Keating In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers represented California as an island. They weren't being careless. Nor were they drawing New Yorker covers. These 16th century cartographers were, instead, mapping the limits of both what they knew and what they imagined. Cartography is as much an art as a science and maps always mirror how we see the world. Thus Peter Keating's beautifully illustrated new book, Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. Assembling nearly 100 of history's most consequential political maps, Keating's thesis is that maps are not neutral. They are arguments. Every map centers something — a religion, an empire, a people — and pushes something else to the margins. The story of cartography, then, is the story of power. Five Takeaways •       California Was an Island: The Power of Imagined Geography: In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers drew California as a large island off the coast of America. They weren't being careless — they were mapping the edge of what was known and imaginable. Before any map can draw a border, Keating argues, it has to decide what is real. The T-and-O medieval maps placed Jerusalem at the center of the world, with the biblically admitted lands of Europe, Africa, and Asia radiating outward. Only slowly, and with great difficulty, did the Western cartographic tradition absorb the fact that there was a whole continent between their imagination and the Pacific. •       The Oldest Tension in Cartography: Sacred vs Scientific: Keating identifies two traditions in constant tension throughout Western history. The cosmographical tradition: center what you know and believe, place your gods and sacred lands at the middle of the world, and mix fantasy with inquiry. The scientific tradition: starting with Ptolemy in ancient Greece and independently in ancient China, create maps that generals and kings could actually use to expand territory, find resources, and identify enemies. With Rome's Christianisation, the cosmographical tradition dominated for nearly a thousand years. The Ptolemaic scientific tradition only re-emerged with the Renaissance and exploration. •       Poland: The Most Erased Country in Cartographic History: Keating's answer to his own question — which country has been wiped off maps most often yet survived? Poland. It disappeared from maps at least three times, divided and partitioned by more geographically fortunate powers — Habsburgs, Russians, Nazis — whose cultural and military might seemed overwhelming. And yet Poland survived every erasure in the hearts of its people. A 1956 map of Poland as a carnation, published by the communist government as a May Day celebration, reads — Keating argues — as subversive under the surface: a nation asserting its existence against the regime that claimed to represent it. •       Lincoln's Favorite Map: The Slave Density Survey: The most powerful map in the book: the 1861 Coast Survey, a non-ideological government project that shaded American counties by the density of enslaved populations. Lincoln studied it obsessively. He reasoned that where enslaved people were densest, Union troops could arrive as liberators and find support. Where they were rare — in predominantly white areas of the South — he could pursue accommodation and peace. The map shaped the Emancipation Proclamation's geography. And because enslaved populations had settled where the delta soils were richest, the map also explains the cultural and political geography of the American South today. •       The Two-Color Election Map Is Making Democracy Worse: Every two years, Americans are shown the same red-and-blue electoral map. Keating's verdict: it is a bad projection, a winner-take-all distortion, and a representation of the Electoral College's biases rather than actual political sentiment. Research shows that two-color maps increase cynicism, cause people to underestimate the number of fellow-partisans in other states, and erode faith in politics. In a democracy, maps should reflect actual political support. The United States is overdue for population-based electoral maps. About the Guest Peter Keating is a narrative journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and Politico. He was a longtime columnist and founding member of the Investigative Unit at ESPN, where he was part of teams that won three National Magazine Awards. He is the author of Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World (Black Dog & Leventhal, May 12, 2026) and Dingers! A Short History of the Long Ball. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey. References: •       Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World by Peter Keating (Black Dog & Leventhal, May 12, 2026). •       Saul Steinberg's “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” The New Yorker, 1976 — the famous New Yorker cover discussed in the interview. •       Episode 2908: Audun Dahl on moral judgements — the parallel episode on how framing shapes perception. •       Episode 2909: Adrian Goldsworthy on Athens and Sparta — referenced in the conversation. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - California as an island: sixteenth-century Spanish maps (02:14) - What imagined maps teach us: the limits of knowledge (04:30) - The New Yorker cover of 1976: New York's view of the world (05:22) - Two traditions in tension: cosmographical vs scientific (08:13) - Geo...

“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost Please don't use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demystify far-right populism is via the movie The Matrix through its idea of “red pill” politics. David Ost's new book, Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today's Far Right, argues that to grasp the threat we need to stop stepping out of the Third Reich and into The Matrix. The red pill, borrowed from the 1999 dystopian classic, has been appropriated by the far right as a metaphor for seeing through the liberal hegemony they claim distorts reality. Popping a red pill himself, Ost argues that while today's far right shares the essential DNA of classical fascism, it nonetheless operates in a world in which outright dictatorship isn't viable. Mussolini, Ost warns, didn't become totalitarian until four years after taking power. Fascism, then, is a process. It takes time. Even dystopias require patience. The book is also a manifesto for left counter-politics. Yes, Law and Justice in Poland and Orbán in Hungary have both been voted out, Ost acknowledges. But in Poland, he warns, the Tusk government won power in 2023 and then governed timidly, afraid of alienating the center, failing its own base on abortion and LGBT rights, and then losing the presidential election. So the lesson from Eastern Europe is that economic left populism, not liberal caution, is the best antidote to red pill politics. Mamdani not Starmer. Otherwise the F-word will once again become a reality. Five Takeaways •       The F-Word Has Become Meaningless: Every application of “fascism” to Trump, Orbán, or Meloni is immediately met with the counter: “Are we killing you? Are we throwing you in jail?” And seemingly the matter is put to rest. Ost's argument: the f-word has become a conversation-stopper rather than a conversation-starter. It lets the far right off the hook by setting the bar at Nazi-level violence. The actual threat — the delegitimisation of institutions, the treatment of opponents as traitors, the erosion of democratic norms — is already underway, without the gas chambers that the f-word implies. •       Opponents vs Traitors: The Defining Distinction: In a democracy, you have opponents. You disagree with them, you campaign against them, you try to vote them out. In far-right politics, you have traitors. People who disagree with you are not legitimate participants in a political contest — they are enemies of the nation, people who do not belong, people who are working against the interests of the real people. This distinction — not violence, not the gas chambers, but the redefinition of legitimate opposition as treachery — is Ost's clearest marker of the transition from normal democratic politics to something else. •       Mussolini's Four Years: How Long Before Dictatorship? When Mussolini first came to power, there were still elections. He tried to rig the game — to gerrymander, to use contemporary parlance — and institutionalise his authority. He only turned to outright dictatorship after four years in power. That was a different time. But the pattern — of coming to power through elections and then slowly making it impossible to be removed through elections — is not unique to Italy. Ost argues we may currently be in the equivalent of Mussolini's first four years in several countries simultaneously. •       What Eastern Europe Teaches America: The Tusk Warning: Law and Justice in Poland governed for eight years and was voted out in 2023. The lesson should be hopeful. But the coalition that replaced it, led by Donald Tusk, governed timidly — afraid of doing anything that might alienate the center, failing to deliver on abortion rights and domestic partnerships, and then lost the presidential election. Ost's verdict: a Biden mistake. When the center-left or left comes to power, it must be consequentially left populist — not just different from the right in tone and temperament, but materially different in what it does for regular people. Caution is its own kind of failure. •       Mamdani as Real-World Exhibit A: Ost was writing the book when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani campaigned explicitly to speak to voters who had voted for Trump — asking why they were moving in that direction and arguing that a universalist left could speak to their material concerns without abandoning minorities. For Ost, this is the model: economic populism that is genuinely redistributionist, that speaks to small cities and rural areas, that is tough on the issues rather than cautious about public opinion. A left that actually stands for something. About the Guest David Ost is an emeritus professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today's Far Right (The New Press, May 19, 2026), The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, and other books. He has written for a wide range of scholarly and popular publications, has done research in Polish factories, and once drove a NYC taxi. He lives in Ithaca, New York. References: •       Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today's Far Right by David Ost (The New Press, May 19, 2026). •       Jonathan Rauch, “Yes, It's Fascism,” The Atlantic — the piece Andrew references at the opening, and the episode we produced around it. •       Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works — cited as the book Ost's is in conversation with. •       Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die — Levitsky blurbs the book. •       Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on making Hungary boring again — the companion episode on Orbán's defeat, referenced directly. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTube

“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn't live as long.” — Michael Clinton At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own longevity consultancy, a columnist for Esquire and Men's Health, a private pilot, part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026). Rather than about living forever, Longevity Nation dares us to redefine what the second half of our lives can look like. And Clinton wants us to reinvent society accordingly. A hundred years ago, he reminds us, only seven million Americans were over 65. Today there are 62 million, which will quickly grow to 80 million. The whole world is aging, and its institutions are not keeping up. Retirement, Michael Clinton explains, is a false construct invented a century ago by industrial age governments. Rewire, the septuagenarian marathoner says. Don't retire. Five Takeaways •       This Is What 72 Looks Like Today: Clinton's opening provocation: at 70, he hiked to Everest Base Camp and ran the marathon down. He's visited 125 countries, run marathons on all seven continents, holds two master's degrees, and is a private pilot. His point is not to brag. It is that the cultural image of what 70 or 80 looks like has not caught up with the reality of what a subset of 70 and 80-year-olds — and, increasingly, a growing proportion of 70 and 80-year-olds — actually look like and are capable of. When he was 40, 72 seemed ancient. Now he is 72. It doesn't. •       GLP-1: Hotel California or Longevity's First Democratised Drug? The sharpest exchange in the interview. Andrew's framing: GLP-1 is Hotel California — you can check in but not check out. Stop taking it and the weight and inflammation return. Clinton's response: yes, that seems to be the story right now, and nobody knows the long-term play. But GLP-1 is coming to Medicare this summer, price cut in half, and it may become the first truly democratised longevity drug — reducing obesity, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk across the income spectrum, not just for the wealthy. Exciting and uncertain in equal measure. •       Retirement Is a False Construct: Social Security was created at a moment when most Americans died before collecting it. Life expectancy was 62. The retirement age was 65. The construct was built for a world that no longer exists. Clinton's prescription: don't retire. Rewire. You don't have to do the same thing, but do something. Stay engaged. Stay purposeful. If you're 65 and live another thirty years, the retirement construct — move to Florida, play golf, wait — is not merely insufficient. It is actively harmful to cognitive and physical health. •       Longevity Nation vs Gerontocracy: Andrew raises the counter-argument: is longevity nation actually gerontocracy? Trump, Biden, Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nancy Pelosi. A class of elderly people who won't step aside, hoarding power and preventing generational renewal. Clinton's response: he is opposed to formal retirement ages for anyone. His answer to the political hoarding of power is not age limits but engagement — people need purpose, and purpose should be redirected, not cut off. Andrew's unspoken counter: this is easy to say when you're not the one being blocked by an eighty-year-old senator. •       Who Do You Want Around Your Deathbed? Clinton's most personal observation, via the book he co-authored: as you think about living longer, ask yourself — who are the five people you would want around your deathbed? And are you maintaining those relationships? The grandson of a funeral director, Clinton has a different relationship with death than most. His prescription: the longer you live, the more important it becomes to keep your closest relationships strong. Longevity without community is not longevity. It is just duration. About the Guest Michael Clinton is the former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines, founder of Roar Forward, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026) and Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It's Too Late). He is a columnist for Men's Health and Esquire, a private pilot, a marathon runner on all seven continents, and a part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina. He lives in New York City and Water Mill, Long Island. References: •       Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives by Michael Clinton (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026). •       Stanford Center on Longevity, New Map of Life — cited by Clinton as one of the major research frameworks behind the book. •       Samuel Moyn, Gerontocratic Nation — the Yale professor's forthcoming counter-argument, referenced by Andrew. •       Cara Swisher, Cara Swisher Wants to Live Forever — the CNN series referenced at the opening as the sceptical counterpart to Clinton's optimism. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Cara Swisher wants to live forever (01:33) - How old are you, Michael? 72 and proud (01:57) - The Everest Base Camp hike at 70 (02:17) - Is the longevity boom a coastal elite phenomenon? (03:15) - A hundred years ago: seven million over-65s; today, 62 million (03:46) - The cultural shift:...

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don't necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff's Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. Today I talk with someone who explains how this kind of injustice is built into the game's DNA. Nick Greene — long-suffering Newcastle United fan and author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius — has a new book, How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius, which tells us what architects, stuntwomen, paleoanthropologists and computer scientists tell us about the beautiful game. What they tell us is that the game isn't fair. One NASA scientist tells Greene that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” because the low-scoring nature of the game means results don't reliably identify the better team. Thus the dark fate of the free-scoring, brilliantly inventive Hungarians in 1954 and the Dutch in 1974. So if you want to watch the World Cup like a genius, don't expect the best team to win the tournament. Which may explain why Greene suspects that England — where the pain of World Cup injustice is a national fetish — will win in 2026. On penalties probably. Arsenal style. After 120 minutes of goalless football. Five Takeaways •       Soccer Is a Poorly Designed Experiment: A NASA scientist published a peer-reviewed paper concluding that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” — the low number of goals means results don't reliably identify the better team. Greene's observation: any soccer fan could have told him that, and saved the journal space. But this is also what makes the game what it is. Unlike basketball's seven-game playoff series — which gives the best team enough chances to emerge on top — a single World Cup match, in a single-elimination tournament, means one error can have outsized consequences. The imperfect and the human are inseparable. •       Justice Has Nothing to Do With It: The 1974 Dutch vs 2004 Greece: Andrew's most painful memory: the 1974 World Cup final, where the magnificent Dutch side led by Cruyff was beaten by the Germans. The Dutch didn't win, but they are remembered as one of the greatest teams in history. The 2004 Greek side, which won Euro 2004 by parking the bus and grinding nil-nil victories, actually won — and are remembered as a fluke. The lesson Greene draws: the shared understanding built into soccer watching is that winning is only one metric, and often not the most important one. It is an imperfect and profoundly human enterprise. •       How to Appreciate Defense: The cliché American complaint about soccer is the low scoring. Greene's response: this is partly a failure to appreciate defense, which in soccer can look like the absence of good offense. He discusses Italy's history of outstanding defensive play — the Catenaccio system, Paolo Maldini, Beckenbauer — and the intelligence required to prevent goals. Andrew's contribution: his wife, who watches American football, taught him that defense is where the sophistication lives. The same is true of soccer. The genius watcher watches the defenders. •       VAR: Too Much, Going in the Right Direction: Greene's measured verdict on VAR — video assistant refereeing. His worst case: when it ruins a goal celebration. The player scores, the crowd erupts, the flag goes up, three minutes of review, okay everyone start celebrating again. That destroys the cathartic moment that makes soccer's rare goals so electrifying. His prediction: VAR will evolve toward the coach's challenge model used in American football and basketball — a limited number of challenges per half, preserving the flow of the game while correcting the worst errors. It's relatively young. It'll be futted and fidgeted with. •       Don't Bet On It. Watch the Game: Greene's best advice for American newcomers to soccer. Not about tactics, not about history. Betting on soccer is a mug's game — partly because results don't reliably reflect the better team (the NASA paper again), and partly because talking about your bets is the least interesting conversation you can have about sport. His prediction for the tournament: England. Reasoning: Harry Kane is playing. Andrew's reaction: Kane is a Spurs man, so reluctant endorsement. But please, Nick. Don't. About the Guest Nick Greene is a contributing writer at Slate and the author of How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius: What Architects, Stuntwomen, Paleoanthropologists, and Computer Scientists Reveal About the World's Game (Abrams Press, May 12, 2026) and How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius (Abrams Press, 2021). His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a Newcastle United fan and lives in Berkeley, California. References: •       How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius by Nick Greene (Abrams Press, May 12, 2026). •       Simon Kuper, Going to the Match — referenced in the introduction as a recent KOA episode on nine consecutive World Cups. •       Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World — referenced as the prior KOA World Cup episode. •       David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer — blurbed the book; relevant to the 1974 Dutch discussion. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“The dangers are human, not AI. What's dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare I'm in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Brookings Institution senior fellow, serial author and one of the most rigorous minds in Washington — onto the show to discuss AI. Rauch had a simple mission. He wanted to find out why Keith Teare is just about the only person in the universe who believes that AI is benign. Jon had five buckets of doom to dump on Keith: labour market disruption, political upheaval, mental health and cognition, malicious actors, and the biggest daddy of all — AI developing consciousness, setting its own agenda, and killing everyone (even Keith). But Keith maintained his Yorkshire stoicism under intense scrutiny from the analogue Rauch machine. AI is a word-counting machine, he explained. Large language models train on words, not experience. They split words into a probabilistic graph of correlations. When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, word by word. In that sense, he says, AI is no cleverer than a calculator. The idea that it has awareness, consciousness, or a plan is mythological. What's dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what AI does itself. The dangers, he says, are human. Jon wasn't entirely reassured (his Brookings brand is scepticism, after all). What worries him most is that humans will handle these technologies irresponsibly. On that, he and Keith agree. The short-term labour disruption will be significant. White-collar service provision — legal, accounting, junior consulting — is already going. Jobs will go too. Work, Keith insists, will not. But nobody in politics is having the conversation about what comes next. Not JD. Not AOC. Only Keith and Jon. Five Takeaways •       AI Is a Word-Counting Machine: Keith's Core Argument: Large language models train on words and only words. They split those words into a probabilistic graph — how close is word A to word B? When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, producing output word by word. There is no awareness. There is no consciousness. There is no plan. The idea that such a system could develop its own agenda is mythological. It's no cleverer than a calculator. It's just a very big, very fast calculator. Rauch's counter: the brain is also just dumb neurons. We get emergence from dumb neurons. Keith's reply: what the AI can do is constrained by what humans allow it to do. The agency is human. •       Doomerism as Business Model: Before engaging with any specific AI doom argument, Keith signals a prior: whenever there is ambiguity in a major technological change, a business model emerges to monetize doubt. It was true of nuclear power. It was true of climate change. It is true of AI. This doesn't mean the fears are groundless — they wouldn't sell if they weren't reasonable. But it means they should be approached with prior scepticism. The doom argument works precisely because AI genuinely contains possible negative outcomes. The business model packages and amplifies those possibilities beyond their actual probability. •       The Guardrails Are Human: Keith's metaphor: AI sits in a prison where humans decide what the doors are. If you give it access to email, it can email. If you don't, it can't. It cannot take actions it has not been permitted to take. The word “guardrails” is commonly used, and it's apt: the constraints on what AI can do are entirely under human control. The word output is the statistical engine — that's not controllable. But its ability to act on words is highly constrained. The danger is not what AI does. It is what humans choose to allow AI to do. •       Jobs vs Work: The Labour Disruption Argument: Rauch's young friends in junior consulting are watching their jobs go in real time. Keith distinguishes between jobs — paid labour — and work, which is closer to effort and creative agency. Jobs can go. Work, he argues, will not — humans will always be reinterpreting the future they want and working to make it happen. But the short-term disruption will be significant: white-collar service provision (legal, accounting, consulting), teaching, driving. The wealth creation AI enables could supplement the end of paid labour. But no one in government is having that conversation. •       Rauch's Verdict: Clarified, Not Reassured: After fifty minutes with Keith Teare, Jonathan Rauch reaches a considered position: his worst fear — that AI becomes an autonomous engine of anti-human malfeasance — is unlikely to happen unless humans make it happen. His residual concern: that humans will not handle these technologies as maturely as one could wish. He's not optimistic about political systems that are already too rigid, too partisan, and too dysfunctional to adjust as they did to the industrialization of the late nineteenth century. On that, he and Keith agree. Nobody knows. Not Keith. Not Andrew. And, despite his brilliance, not Jonathan Rauch. About the Guests Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch. Jonathan Rauch is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, The Happiness Curve, Kindly Inquisitors, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, and many other books. He is based in Washington, D.C. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch. •       Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — the AI doom book referenced in the conversation. •       Sam Harris and Tristan Harris podcast on AI risk — referenced by Rauch as the catalyst for his questions. •       Episode 2902: Keith Teare on his jobless AI future vision — the preceding TWTW episode directly referenced. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. 

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especially to people under forty), it does recognize that our moral views change. But, as the Cornell psychologist Audun Dahl argues in his new book Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing, the most interesting question is why our moral principles always seem in flux. Why people who say cheating is wrong cheat. Why people who say violence is wrong turn a blind moral eye to their own insurrections. Dahl is a psychologist, not a moralist. He is not interested in what we should believe, but in what we think we believe. His central finding is that human morality is neither fixed nor fickle. People change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to — reasons they can, indeed, articulate. The problem isn't hypocrisy per se. It's that we struggle to understand why the other side believes what it does. In morally polarised societies like contemporary America, we over-attribute psychopathy to political opponents. Most Republicans and most Democrats do have genuine moral commitments. But they are just different principles, applied to parallel moral hierarchies. Rather than morality perhaps, we need more empathy. Don't judge. Understand. Five Takeaways •       Two Kinds of Moral Change: Dahl identifies two forms of moral change that should trouble us. Situational moral change: people espouse one principle and act against it in a specific situation — the person who says cheating is wrong and cheats on an exam, the January 6th rioter who says violence is wrong. Historical moral change: the same principles coexisting with practices that contradict them — Thomas Jefferson proclaiming inalienable rights while enslaving hundreds. Both are not simply hypocrisy: they reflect the genuine messiness of moral life, where competing principles create constant conflict. •       Morality Emerges in the First Three Years of Life: Dahl's most striking empirical finding: by around age three, virtually all children develop an intrinsic concern with how we ought to treat other sentient beings. It is not taught as an external rule. It emerges. A three-year-old will say: it's wrong to harm others, you shouldn't steal. No other animal acquires this. It is a uniquely human characteristic. The question is not whether people have moral commitments — almost everyone does. The question is how those commitments interact with other concerns, pressures, and competing principles. •       We Over-Attribute Psychopathy to the Other Side: One of the most robustly documented findings in political psychology: Republicans and Democrats don't merely think the other side is wrong. They think the other side is evil — likely to condone things they would never condone. Research shows both sides significantly over-estimate the other's extremism and moral depravity. Dahl's prescription: develop better theories of why the other side believes what it does. An accurate theory includes recognising genuine psychopaths and bad actors when they exist. It also includes recognising that they are rarer than we think. •       Jefferson, Epstein, and the Exceptions: Two historical anchors. Jefferson: the author of the Declaration of Independence's inalienable rights, who enslaved hundreds. The question is not whether he was a hypocrite — he clearly was — but how someone could hold both positions simultaneously. The answer Dahl finds most compelling: conflicting moral principles applied with different weights in different contexts, not the absence of moral concern. Epstein: the opposite case, a man who concealed an absence of moral concern behind a veneer of respectability. The lesson: some people genuinely lack it, but they are exceptions. •       Elbow Room: The Hilary Mantel Closer: Dahl's two wishes for a more moral world. First: that we understand why the other side disagrees. Second: that we have more “elbow room” — the phrase from Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy — to make decisions based on what we actually think is right rather than what we need to do to survive. Machiavelli and Cromwell operated in a world where survival left almost no room for principled action. If that is becoming our world again, the prospects for moral progress are bleak. Dahl is cautiously hopeful. The creative, restless energy of each new generation — willing to say this is unjust, this is unfair — is what abolished slavery. It is what drives moral change still. About the Guest Audun Dahl is Associate Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard University Press, April 2026). He grew up in Norway and is based in Ithaca, New York. References: •       Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing by Audun Dahl (Harvard University Press, April 2026). •       Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall trilogy — cited by Dahl as capturing the “elbow room” problem of moral action under survival pressure. •       Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning — referenced in the same context as Mantel. •       Episode 2906: Dylan Gottlieb on Yuppies — the companion episode on how professional class morality was shaped by competing incentives. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - The Churchill/Adams quote: liberal at 20, conservative at 40 (02:08) - Dahl's Norwegian grandpa and the disputed attribution (02:30) - Two kinds of troubling moral change: situational and historical (03:10) - Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and his enslaved peopl...

“History is really interesting because it's about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there's room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy covers the long fifth century BC, from the Persian Wars that forced Athens and Sparta into alliance, through the Peloponnesian War that set them against each other. The parallels of the rivalry between Sparta and Athens are uncannily relevant today. Goldsworthy traces the NATO-like structure of the Athenian alliance, with its familiar complaint that the allies weren't paying enough. He notes that Athens, which outgrew its ability to grow its own food, had to secure its grain supply from the Black Sea — in the same way as closing the Straits of Hormuz has disrupted modern supply chains. And he observes that the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by getting Persian money — while the Athenians were doing exactly the same thing. Persia, he notes, is always lurking in the background. There would be no “west” without it. Five Takeaways •       Athens and Sparta: Two Experiments, One Greek Longing: Both city states were driven by the same competitive Greek impulse — the desire to excel, to be the best. But they ran radically different experiments in how to achieve it. Athens: radical democracy, open society, maritime empire, philosophy, drama. Sparta: apartheid military state, in which a tiny Spartan elite was freed from all labour by a vast population of helots, so that they could devote their entire lives to being warriors and citizens. Two models for a polity that still structure political argument today. •       Thucydides: Essential but Embittered: The History of the Peloponnesian War is the essential source — and the problematic one. Thucydides was an Athenian general who failed to save a city from a Spartan-led force and went into exile as a result. He is analytical and apparently balanced in ways that seem modern. But he cannot hide his biases: the demagogue Cleon gets speeches written for him that make him look like a self-interested buffoon. And his silences are as revealing as his words — large events, including an Athenian disaster in Egypt, are mentioned only vaguely. He tells us what he wants to tell. •       The NATO Parallel: They Weren't Paying Enough: The Delian League — the Athenian alliance that emerged after the Persian Wars — has a structural similarity to NATO that Goldsworthy notes carefully. Athens, like the United States, is the dominant naval power that has mobilised for a great threat and then chosen not to demobilise. The allies, like European NATO members in successive administrations' complaints, weren't willing to send ships or men. They'd just send a bit of cash. The Athenian fleet ends up overwhelmingly Athenian. As the threat recedes, the other states increasingly resent the protection they're receiving from it. •       Persia Is Always There: The Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by securing subsidies from the Persian Empire. The Athenians were doing the same thing. The irony: both sides of the Greek world's greatest internal conflict ended up funded by the barbarian power they had united to defeat a generation earlier. Goldsworthy draws the modern parallel delicately: America is now fighting a war in Iran, once known as Persia. Europe chose not to join. The question of who Persia is in any given age is always live. Persia, he says, is always there. It always has been. •       Athens as a Theme Park: The Roman Legacy: In the Roman period, Athens and Sparta became what Goldsworthy calls “university cities or, in Sparta's case, a theme park.” Sparta, having lost any real military or political power, invented a public performance of its old customs — a tourist attraction for Roman visitors who wanted to see the old ways enacted. Athens was a university town for the Roman elite, whose children went there as we might go to Oxford. What we think we know about classical Greece is partly filtered through this late antique nostalgia — a celebration of how great we used to be. About the Guest Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian, novelist, and YouTuber with a DPhil from Oxford. He is the author of Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece (Basic Books, May 12, 2026), Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, How Rome Fell, Philip and Alexander, Rome and Persia, and many other books. He lives in Penarth, South Wales. References: •       Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece by Adrian Goldsworthy (Basic Books, May 12, 2026). •       Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War — the essential and problematic source, discussed at length. •       Episode 2897: Patrick Wyman on Lost Worlds — directly referenced in the interview as a contrasting style of history. •       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on the modern Persian conflict, referenced in the interview. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I've ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don't have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb Brandon Webb defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL sniper, and father. But not in that order. The first three he leveraged into a series of bestselling books about the art of sniping. The fourth — the art of being a loving father — he dodged and ducked for years. But fatherhood might be Webb's real calling. People regularly pulled him aside after meeting his grown children to ask him about his “secret” for being an effective dad. His kids were making eye contact, they were asking good questions rather than staring at their phones. Most astonishingly, they seemed happy. Webb's new book, Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids, reveals his secret of parenting. It applies the positive performance psychology Webb learned as a Navy SEAL sniper instructor — how to redirect negative self-talk, how to deal with well-meaning adults who say damaging things, how to build mental toughness without destroying connection — to the work of raising children. It outlines his parenting philosophy of both high expectations and high support. Think of Puddle Jumpers as simultaneously the manual for tiger and the bunny parenting. Brandon Webb's ultimate calling in life is as a parent. Father, author, entrepreneur and Navy SEAL sniper. In that order. Five Takeaways •       The Sniper Instructor as Parenting Coach: Webb was running the Navy SEAL sniper program at 27 years old. The psychology they taught there — positive self-talk, replacing negative internal narratives, dealing with adversity without being broken by it — is what he applied to parenting. The connection is not as strange as it sounds: both sniping and parenting require performing under pressure, dealing with failure without catastrophising, and building confidence that is genuine rather than brittle. The difference is that the stakes in parenting last a lifetime. •       High Expectations, High Support: Webb's alternative to the false choice between permissive parenting and authoritarian discipline. Permissive parenting replaces preparation with protection. Authoritarian discipline breaks connection. Puddle Jumper Parenting holds both simultaneously: clear expectations and emotional safety. Kids need to know what's required of them. They also need to know they won't be abandoned when they fail. Webb's word for children raised this way: puddle jumpers — kids who leap into life's messy moments with full-hearted abandon, not because they're fearless but because they trust themselves to recover. •       The Credit Card Lesson: Don't Bail Them Out: Webb's son Jackson managed a self-storage facility through college and ended up with a $25,000 ownership payout as a sophomore at St Andrews. He spent it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, got a credit card, ran up $12,000 in debt at predatory interest rates, and called his father for help. Webb's response: you remember that conversation we had? Figure it out. He let his son suffer. Jackson's girlfriend hated Webb for two years. At the end, Jackson paid off the debt with a new business and told his father it was one of the best lessons he'd ever been taught. It would have been easy to bail him out. The suffering was the lesson. •       Purpose and the War Veteran: Viktor Frankl's Lesson: How does a combat veteran come home intact? Webb's answer: purpose. His Afghanistan deployment had clear moral logic — the propaganda posters in the caves, the training camps, the towers. That clarity carried him through. Iraq was different. Soldiers who went to Iraq with no understanding of why they were there — and whose friends in 2010 were saying we have no idea what we're doing here — came home broken. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: purpose is the thing that makes endurance possible. Without it, violence that cannot be assigned rational meaning produces serious mental illness. •       Teach Kids About Money: The American Economy Preys on Them: Webb has strong opinions: America's economy is largely fuelled by consumer debt. Credit card companies prey on college students because they know the parents will bail them out. Kids need to understand the system before the system takes advantage of them. His prescription: teach them age-appropriate financial literacy early. The Acorns Early app gamifies financial learning for children. The deal he struck with all his kids in college: I pay for school, you have a roof and food, but if you want to socialise, get a job. The lesson is not just about money. It's about agency. About the Guest Brandon Webb is a combat-decorated Navy SEAL sniper, multiple New York Times bestselling author, Harvard Business School alumnus, and father of three. He is the author of Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 12, 2026), The Red Circle, The Killing School, and The Making of a Navy SEAL. He divides his time between Portugal and New York City. References: •       Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids by Brandon Webb (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 12, 2026). •       Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning — Webb cites it as one of his favourite books, and the source of his thinking on purpose and combat trauma. •       Episode 2888: Helen Benedict on The Soldier's House — directly referenced in the interview; Webb's purpose-in-war argument is the complement to Benedict's moral injury argument. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It's actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street's deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogged. They drank Beaujolais Nouveau. They gentrified neighborhoods. They were the Yuppies — and with the Boston-based Dylan Gottlieb, they've found their young urban professional biographer. In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, Gottlieb offers both a social history of financialization and a collective biography of the professional class that came of age in the Reagan years. Rather than a passing 1980s stereotype, Gottlieb argues that the Yuppie is a phenomenon that remade the American economy, city, and political class. As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. A decade of deregulation later, banks were recruiting a third of graduating classes from top universities. The sweatshop of the meritocracy was born. Most of us are still sweating. Five Takeaways •       From Yippie to Yuppie: The Word's Origins: Yuppie resonates with Yippie — the iconographic late-sixties radicals of the New Left, for whom Jerry Rubin was the signifier. The word first appeared in a Chicago alt-weekly in the late 1970s to describe highly educated young people trickling into gentrifying North Side neighbourhoods. It didn't achieve full cultural dominance until 1984, when it became the frame for supporters of Gary Hart's presidential campaign — a prototypical Yuppie candidate who stormed the Democratic primary and represented a new professional vanguard within the party. The word named something that was already happening. It didn't create it. •       The Incentive Structure Changed: Under 5% to One Third: As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. It was seen as the preserve of WASPy children who used family connections to get a bank job. By the mid-1980s, banks were recruiting roughly a third of graduating classes at top universities. What happened: deregulation made finance enormously more profitable; finance demanded a large educated labour force to do the work of putting finance at the centre of the American economy; and the most talented students — those who might have become poets or public servants — followed the money. At mid-century, the most prestigious option for a Princeton graduate was middle management at a Fortune 500 company. By 1985, it was Wall Street. •       Democratization and Distinction: The Double Movement: Gottlieb's central thesis is a double movement. The Yuppie era brought genuine diversification to America's elite: Jewish lawyers could now make partner at firms previously closed to them; women entered investment banks in numbers that would have been inconceivable in 1965; Black and Asian Americans got at least a foot in the door. This was new, and it mattered. Simultaneously, that newly diversified elite pulled further away from the rest of America, extracting profits from companies being financialized and rents from communities being gentrified. Democratization and distinction in constant tension. The elite became more diverse and more remote at the same time. •       The Pyramid to Cylinder Shift: AI is about to do to the Yuppie what the Yuppie did to everybody else. Gottlieb spoke recently to an HR representative at an investment bank — name and bank withheld — who said the firm was moving from a pyramid structure to a cylinder structure for employment. The wide base of entry-level workers that finance has depended on since the 1980s will shrink dramatically. Only the best and brightest will be selected; the rest will be automated. Gottlieb wrote about the era of the large pyramid — the exploited many at the bottom who hoped to reach the top. What happens to the professional class when that pyramid disappears? •       Are the Yuppies Becoming Socialists? A long-running trend: the pressures of the sweatshop of the meritocracy have embittered many members of the professional class. Academics work in conditions demonstrably worse than they were forty years ago. Doctors are evaluated on metrics that resemble those of factory workers. Journalists are precarious. The housing market in the cities where professionals cluster has made the cost of replicating their social status for their children prohibitive. And into this comes AI, threatening the entry-level pipeline. Gottlieb's question: will the investment bankers see their plight as similar to the Amazon warehouse worker's? Or will the edifice of meritocratic myth-making — the deep conviction that you're special — hold them back from that solidarity? About the Guest Dylan Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University and co-host of the Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism podcast. He is the author of Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026), winner of the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. He has written for the Washington Post, Gotham, the Journal of American History, and Public Seminar. References: •       Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026). •       Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of a College-Educated Working Class — the companion book, referenced in the interview as directly relevant to Gottlieb's thesis. •       Barbara Ehrenreich — referenced by Gottlieb as the first to identify the downwardly mobile tranche of the professional class. •       Episode 2895: Glyn Morgan on the rise and fall of American Europe — the companion episode on how the professional class shaped American foreign policy. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeAp...

“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated evacuation. Residents fought the flames with garden hoses. “Where are the firefighters?” somebody, running from the fire, screamed into a live television shot. Where, indeed, were Los Angeles firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti — CBS national correspondent, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner — was there from the beginning. His new book, Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles, is the searing firsthand account of the tragic failure of the Los Angeles authorities to respond to the fire. The story Vigliotti tells is not new. In some ways, it is a carbon copy of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in Northern California. First as tragedy then as farce: inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, officials who failed to act were repeated almost exactly in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. More than eighty people died in Paradise and more than thirty in the LA fires. The economic damage in LA will likely make it the costliest natural disaster in US history. And when the LA mayor and the Californian governor appeared in the first press conference after the fires broke out, Vigliotti reports, all Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom were talking about was the 2028 Olympics. The political reckoning has not happened, Vigliotti warns. Bass is still mayor and Newsom is a Presidential frontrunner for 2028. California's current governor's race is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state, the one where more than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into agencies over several years with more than half a billion unaccounted for — is barely mentioned. The fires will be back, Vigliotti warns. Maybe this year for the World Cup, maybe in 2028 for the Olympics. So where are the firefighters? Five Takeaways •       Where Are the Firefighters? The Central Question: Vigliotti was on scene from the first moments of the Palisades Fire. What struck him was not the scale of the flames — he'd seen wildfires before — but the absence of any official response. No firefighters at ground zero. No coordinated evacuation. The traffic gridlock that formed within an hour of ignition blocked fire trucks from getting through. Residents fought embers with garden hoses. A man running from the hillside screamed into Vigliotti's live shot: “Where are the firefighters?” That question became the question of the disaster — and the book. •       A Carbon Copy of Paradise: The 2018 Camp Fire destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. More than eighty people died. Before it happened: weeks and months of warnings about inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, and officials who failed to act. The same warnings, in almost identical form, were issued for Pacific Palisades and Altadena before January 7, 2025. They were ignored in the same way. The LA fires killed more than thirty people and will likely be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Nobody has been held accountable. Nobody has been fired. •       The Olympics Come First: Vigliotti's most damning reporting: in the first press conference after the Palisades Fire broke out, Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom were already talking about the 2028 Olympic Games and Los Angeles's ability to rebuild in time. The fires were still burning. The framing was already: how do we make this a story of resilience and recovery? Vigliotti's counter: the story is not resilience. It is accountability. The question is not whether Los Angeles can rebuild. It is whether it can avoid the same disaster happening again. •       $2 Billion, Half a Billion Unaccounted For: California's taxes are already among the highest in the country. More than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into homeless-related agencies over several years. More than half a billion was unaccounted for. And the agencies responsible for wildfire prevention and emergency management are chronically underfunded. Vigliotti's argument: it is not that Californians need to pay more taxes. It is that the taxes they pay need to go to the right agencies. The budget for fighting climate change and protecting communities from fire is dwarfed by the budget for crime. Fire kills more people. •       The Political Reckoning That Hasn't Happened: California's governor's race, in the wake of the deadliest and costliest fire season in recent memory, is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state — is barely mentioned. Nobody in the political class, Vigliotti reports, has come to him asking for advice or analysis. He is not holding his breath. His warning: this summer, and every summer, the fire will come back. The conditions that created the Palisades disaster have not been remedied. Los Angeles is not ready. About the Guest Jonathan Vigliotti is a CBS News national correspondent and Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner. He is the author of Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026) and Before It's Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America. He is based in Los Angeles. References: •       Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles by Jonathan Vigliotti (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026). •       Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire — the companion book on the 2018 Camp Fire, referenced in the interview. •       Watch Duty — the wildfire monitoring app Vigliotti mentions as standard equipment for California residents. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstack

 “They're all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they're inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That's the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter. Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile alert of an apocalypse that fizzled, Yu's novel is about a false alarm that sent Asian-American residents of a small Massachusetts town into 19 minutes of existential panic. Seek Immediate Shelter really starts after the fictional all-clear. Because now everyone has revealed their cards. The real games begin. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Seek Immediate Shelter is really a novel about third acts, not second. The first act is normal life. The second is the nineteen minutes of terror. The third — the one that really matters — is the reckoning: the mother who used the alert as an excuse to cruelly insult her daughter; the man who hit the gas and sped away from his family; the woman who confessed her unrequited love. So all clear does not mean all right. The missile alert strips away all the lies of daily life. What's left is a truth as explosive as any missile. Five Takeaways •       The Third Act, Not the Second: F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives — and Yu's novel is a direct argument against that claim. But the book's real focus is the third act: not the nineteen minutes of terror (the second), but the aftermath. The mother who used the alert as permission to say something cruel. The man who sped away from his wife and child. The woman who confessed her love. These are the decisions people made when they thought it was the end. Now they have to live with them. All clear does not mean all right. •       The Petri Dish Method: Yu has a background in biology and no formal training in fiction. He approaches writing scientifically: characters as specimens on petri dishes, a missile alert as the experimental conditions. The pressure-cooker situation strips away the social armour and reveals the character beneath. His goal was not cruelty but pressure — there's a difference. He feels profound empathy for every character. When asked if any are based on real people: they're all me. Every single one. •       Asian American Silence and the Langston Hughes Principle: Yu originally wrote the characters without race. But honesty required him to make them Asian American — citing Langston Hughes's argument that a Black poet cannot write outside of race even if he wants to. Asian American fiction has long focused on immigrant trauma and the difficult parent-child relationship. Yu wants to push beyond that: third- and fourth-generation stories, people who are simply American. The missile alert forces the silence of striving and quiet excellence to break. What's underneath is the novel's real subject. •       Can AI Write This Kind of Novel? Yu has never used AI for his writing and — he admits — hasn't been curious enough to try. His verdict: AI is nowhere close to writing a novel like this. Some genres, with more uniform rubrics, are more vulnerable. But the distinctive cadences of AI writing are currently easy to detect. He is, however, optimistic: the proliferation of AI-generated plots may make readers more discerning, better at recognizing tropes, more hungry for genuinely fresh storytelling. AI might, paradoxically, sharpen the audience for literary fiction. •       The Cuban Missile Crisis, Trump, and COVID as Crucibles: Andrew's provocation: was the Cuban Missile Crisis actually good for America? Did it force a national reckoning? And might Trump and COVID do the same? Yu is reluctant to apply this logic to countries — he deals in characters. But at the individual level: yes. A crucible that forces you to confront what you most cannot bear to part with, what truly matters, can be clarifying. The novel's premise is that the missile alert was such a crucible. The broader lesson may be that we are all living through one. About the Guest Vincent Yu is a fiction writer and sales manager at W. W. Norton/Liveright. He is the winner of the 2021 Ashley Bourne Prize for fiction from Ploughshares and the author of Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026). His short fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Able Muse, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. References: •       Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026). •       The 2018 Hawaii missile alert — the real-life false alarm that inspired the novel. •       Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) — the essay Yu cites on writing within race. •       Episode 2898: James Lasdun on The Family Man — the companion episode on fiction's capacity to go where journalism cannot. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

FOLLOW UP: FCA WARNS PAYOUT SCHEME MAY FOLDThe Financial Conduct Authority has warned that there will be a delay of unknown time frame and even the potential for the finance mis-selling scheme to be cancelled, thanks to the appeals lodged. For more information on this, click this Autocar article link here.APRIL 2026 NEW CAR REGISTRATION FIGURESApril 2026 had the most registrations, since 2019. All except diesel market share went up, with BEV being the most impressive and ending up with an April market share of 26.2% meaning it is at 23.1% for the year so far. Once again Fleet is doing a lot of heavy lifting, although Private rose taking the year to date up to 40.1%. You can find out more, by clicking this SMMT article link here.HONDA AUTOMOTIVE UK GETS A NEW BOSSMichael Doyle replaces Rebecca Adamson, who moves to head up Customer Engagement for Honda Motor Europe. Doyle is coming from Honda Motor Southern Africa, where he was Vice President. Click this MotorTrader article link here, for more.NISSAN TO MERGE SUNDERLAND PRODUCTION LINESNissan is consolidating production lines into one over the next year, at their Sunderland facility. This will apparently not lead to any job losses at the site. Production numbers in 2025 was nearly half that of 2019. For more on this story, click this link to read an electrive article.PORSCHE COST CUTTING BEGINSPorsche has announced it will close three subsidiary companies with 500 jobs going as a consequence. Cellforce Group, battery tech; Porsche eBike, electric drives for bicycles; and Cetitec GmbH, software for data communications are to be shut down. The company will now “refocus on its core business”. If you want to read more, click this Yahoo!Finance article link here.FORD SELLING PART OF SPANISH PLANT TO GEELYFord is looking to sell part of their Valencia plant to Geely, which currently only makes the Kuga. This would be Geely's first European production based. To find out more, click this Autocar article link here.VW IS RIVIAN'S LARGEST SHAREHOLDERThe Volkswagen Group has upped its stake in Rivian from 8.6% to 15.9%, making it the largest single investor in the company. This moves Amazon to second. Rivian has been hitting the milestones the original deal required, which has meant they have received $3 billion from the German company since the announcement of the investment. You can read more, by clicking this TechCrunch 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 -Nissan X-TrailNissan revealed their new X-Trail, a few weeks back. The company is aiming at the likes of the Skoda Kodiaq, Kia Sorento and Peugeot 5008 with this vehicle. No technical specifications have been revealed. Click this Autocar article link to see more.Lexus TZLexus has released images of the TZ, an electric six seat SUV aimed at the Volvo EX90. The vehicle is based on the RZ platform and will have an 96kWh battery enabling a range of up to 330 miles in perfect conditions. The TZ is coming to the UK in 2027 but there are no details as to the price or final specifications. Click this Autocar article link, for more.Morgan Supersport 400Morgan has revealed the Supersport 400 which takes the Supersport and makes its more. The retuned B58 twin-turbo straight-six engine will produce 402bhp, bringing down the 0-62 to 3.6 seconds which is 0.2 seconds quicker than the normal version. On the road price starts at £138,883.00. Click this EVO article link here to read more.LUNCHTIME WATCH: HOW CAR DEALERSHIPS SCAM AMERICALongtime listeners will have heard Alan bemoan how awful American car dealerships and the business model are. He has explained how the price is never the price you first see. But to show how really bad it is we are recommending a Wendover Productions video explaining just how dreadful they are, click this YouTube link to see more.LIST OF THE WEEK: GREAT PEOPLE'S CARSAutocar have a large slideshow dedicated the cars that helped bring mobility to the world. Do you agree with the choices made? What would you pick? Click this link here to see what options you have to select from.AND FINALLY: TIME TO ASK THE DANES TO GO FRENCHA British Engineer, Dave Collins, has created a Lego copy of the Renault 5 Turbo 3E and submitted it to Lego to be considered for making into a model the company sells. Submitted on the 15 April this has already received 8,199 votes (at the time of recording). Click this Top Gear article to read more.To go see the page on Lego Ideas and vote, click this link here.

Sean O'Kane, Senior Reporter of Transportation at TechCrunch, joins Jon Hasen to discuss how Avride, Uber’s partner, is under investigation for crashes involving their driverless cars. To read more stories that Sean has covered, visit techcrunch.com/author/sean-okane/.

Our 244th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 05/08/2026Hosted 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-5.5 Instant as ChatGPT's new default model, showing large benchmark gains and crossing a “high” cyber-risk threshold under its preparedness framework, while bio-safety results were mixed.OpenAI investigated and patched ChatGPT's “goblin” obsession, attributing it to reinforcement-learning rewards that over-amplified playful creature metaphors in a nerdy persona that later bled across versions.Major industry moves included xAI's Grok 4.3 price cuts and voice tools, Mistral's unified Medium 3.5 model and Work mode, and Anthropic's managed-agent upgrades alongside a surprise SpaceX compute deal and reports of a much higher Anthropic valuation.Key policy and security developments covered the Musk–OpenAI trial details, Pentagon AI deployments on classified networks, expanded U.S. government pre-release model reviews, and reports of NSA testing Anthropic's Mythos on Microsoft software.Timestamps:(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:01:14) News Preview(00:04:39) Response to listener commentsTools & Apps(00:13:40) OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 Instant, a new default model for ChatGPT | TechCrunch(00:18:23) ChatGPT Became So Obsessed With Goblins That OpenAI Had to Intervene(00:27:14) xAI launches Grok 4.3 at an aggressively low price and a new, fast, powerful voice cloning suite | VentureBeat(00:33:49) Mistral's new flagship Medium 3.5 folds chat, reasoning, and code into one model(00:39:28) Anthropic updates Claude Managed Agents with three new features - 9to5Mac(00:43:42) ElevenLabs Revamps AI Music Platform as Fan-Focused ServiceApplications & Business(00:44:57) A diary, a threat, and a $30 billion stake: What the Musk vs OpenAI trial has actually shown in its first week - The Times of India(00:55:28) Anthropic, SpaceX Sign Deal to Boost AI Computing Power for Claude Software - Bloomberg(01:01:48) Anthropic in talks with investors to raise funds at $900 billion valuation, higher than OpenAI(01:02:37) Anthropic and OpenAI are both launching joint ventures for enterprise AI services | TechCrunch(01:06:15) Anthropic and FIS Are Building an AI Agent to Help Banks Police Financial Crimes(01:07:02) AMD's revenue jumps 38 percent from last year as Q1 data center sales hit $5.8 billion. | The Verge(01:08:51) Banks seek to offload risk to avoid ‘choking' on data centre debt(01:14:08) DeepSeek could be valued at up to $50 billion in first fundraising, sources say | ReutersProjects & Open Source(01:16:14) Natural Language Autoencoders Produce Unsupervised Explanations of LLM Activations(01:22:23) OpenAI just open-sourced its data center networking technologyPolicy & Safety(01:25:02) Pentagon inks deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS to deploy AI on classified networks | TechCrunch(01:27:27) Google, Microsoft, and xAI will allow the US government to review their new AI models | The Verge(01:32:11) NSA Testing Anthropic's Mythos to Find Flaws in Microsoft Tech(01:35:42) Introspection Adapters: Training LLMs to Report Their Learned BehaviorsResearch & Advancements(01:41:18) Recursive Multi-Agent Systems(01:51:47) Frontier Coding Agents Can Now Implement an AlphaZero Self-Play Machine Learning Pipeline For Connect Four That Performs Comparably to an External SolverSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“We're losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That's the question posed by Ece Temelkuran's new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century. Shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Nonfiction, the narrative is structured as a series of letters from one homeless stranger to another. Temelkuran left Turkey in 2016, after threats to her life made staying untenable. After seven years of exile — in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, Zagreb, and now Berlin — she has written both her own and our story in today's globalized, populist age. She's been called everything from a 21st century Hannah Arendt to a “ruthless Cassandra.” And yet she retains faith in the future — as a defiant stance, a can-do-no-other attitude against rootlessness and loneliness. The wisdom of survival, Ece Temelkuran argues, lies with refugees, exiles and migrants like herself. This nation of strangers are rebuilding home in our homeless world. Five Takeaways •       Four Kinds of Homelessness: Temelkuran identifies four simultaneous crises of home. Physical homelessness: refugees, migrants, the displaced. Political homelessness: people who no longer recognize their countries, who feel unrepresented by any party, who cannot feel that they belong where they are. Moral homelessness: people who see the cruelty of our times and find no institution — state, court, international organization — capable of stopping it. And spiritual homelessness: the loss of language as our innermost home, now shared with AI. Four levels of being unhoused at once. That is the human condition of 2026. •       Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers: The week the book was published in the US, Minneapolis happened — ordinary people forming human chains to resist ICE agents. Temelkuran's reading: that was a Nation of Strangers in action. People who had never met, people from different communities who owed each other nothing in the old sense, holding on to each other because they recognized a shared condition. Not an ideology, not a party, not a leader — just strangers building a home together in real time. That, she says, is what the book is about. •       Digital Refugees: When Elon Musk bought Twitter, millions of people fled to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms — behaving, Temelkuran observes, exactly like refugees. Looking back at the old home while building a new one. Checking both simultaneously. She asks: why did no one think to occupy Twitter? To say: this is ours, not yours? Her conclusion: our political imagination has become extraordinarily limited. We accept displacement, digital or physical, as inevitable. We do not think to resist it by occupying the space rather than fleeing. •       Gaza and the Move-On Ideology: Gaza was the ultimate test of how much humanity can swallow. Temelkuran draws an arc from Colin Powell's tube in the UN Security Council in 2003 — when a global anti-war movement was brushed aside — to today. Each time people mobilize and are ignored, they lose a little more faith in themselves, in politics, in institutions. What devastated Temelkuran most was not the bombing but Jared Kushner at Davos presenting his PowerPoint for a seaside resort in Gaza. That, she says, is what neoliberal morality looks like. Move on. That is the lowest of the low. •       The Pioneers of History: Refugees as the Advance Guard: Temelkuran resisted writing her own story for years — she came from a leftist family where talking about yourself was suspect, and she feared being seen as a victim. What changed: she realized her story intersected with the story of the masses. The wisdom of survival — how to remake home from scratch, how to survive with dignity, how to rebuild identity after losing everything — belongs to refugees, exiles, and migrants. These are the pioneers of history. Soon everyone will need what they know. That is why their stories matter now. About the Guest Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish writer, political thinker, and public speaker. She is the author of Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century (Simon & Schuster, May 2026), shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Nonfiction; How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism; and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World. She was born in Turkey and is based in Berlin. References: •       Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century by Ece Temelkuran (Simon & Schuster, May 2026). •       How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran — the book that made her reputation in the West. •       Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World by Ece Temelkuran — the second book, between How to Lose a Country and Nation of Strangers. •       Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on why Orbán lost and how to defeat Trump — the companion episode on defeating fascism from within the system. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Is Ece still retaining faith in the future? (01:47) - Faith as a stance: like Martin Luther, here I stand (02:30) - How to Lose a Country and what comes next (02:57) - Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers (04:00) - Four kinds of homelessness: physical, political, moral, spiritual (04:35) - AI and the loss of language as spiritual home (05:10) - Why this book now — and why it's the most personal

  In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with Mozilla shipping Firefox 150 with 271 patched bugs found by Anthropic’s Mythos system, the first major real-world deployment of the AlphaGo-Moment cybersecurity tooling. He also covers a 9-year dormant Linux kernel root, a college student stopping Taiwan’s high-speed rail with a software-defined radio, GitHub MCP secret scanning going GA, the NVIDIA NeMo lawsuit surviving its motion to dismiss, the Hugging Face Reachy Mini app store, Anthropic’s Auto Mode for Claude Code, and the 4-gigabyte AI model Chrome silently installed on your computer. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show with the AlphaGo Moment moving from theory into production. Mozilla shipped Firefox 150 this week with 271 patched bugs that Anthropic’s Mythos system found. Furthermore, the broader episode threads a clear pattern: AI tooling is reshaping security, developer workflows, and consumer software faster than the surrounding ecosystem can absorb it. The show closes on the four-gigabyte AI model Chrome installed on a billion machines without explicit consent. Mozilla Ships 271 Mythos Bugs in Firefox 150 Mozilla ran Anthropic’s restricted Mythos system against the Firefox 150 codebase before shipping. The result: 271 found bugs (180 high severity, 80 moderate, 11 low) baked into the release. However, the bigger number is the year-over-year jump. April 2026 shipped 423 total Firefox security fixes versus 31 a year prior. The breakdown for April: 271 from Mythos, 41 from external researchers, and 111 from other internal sources. Cochrane is sticking to his guns on calling this the AlphaGo Moment for cybersecurity. Skeptics argue Mythos is industrial-scale fuzzing because most found bugs sit in memory-safety territory. However, his counter is the velocity itself. Furthermore, he frames the resistance as carriage-versus-cars: humans-first research still grounds the tool, but throughput is the win. The Firefox CTO put it directly: defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively. For developers asking whether Mythos changes anything if they already run fuzzers, Cochrane’s answer is yes, and not even close. Additionally, he notes Mythos is restricted-access. The broadly available tier is Claude Opus 4.7, which Mozilla used since February before getting onto the restricted program for the Firefox 150 cycle. Run Opus 4.7 first. Sponsor: GoDaddy GoDaddy has been sponsoring this show for over twenty years. Economy hosting starts at $6.99/month, WordPress hosting at $12.99/month, and domains at $11.99. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy for exclusive deals and to directly support the show. Copy Fail: 9-Year Linux Kernel Bug, 732 Bytes to Root A 9-year-old dormant Linux kernel bug got disclosed April 29 as CVE-2026-31431. Researchers published a 732-byte Python script that roots every major Linux distribution shipped since 2017. Additionally, CISA added the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on May 1 with a May 15 federal deadline. The bug lives in the kernel’s crypto socket layer through the AF_ALG AEAD interface, originating in a 2017 in-place crypto optimization that lacked bounds checking. Cloudflare published their post-mortem this week. Their first instinct was to remove the kernel module entirely. However, service dependencies forced a workaround instead. Cloudflare resumed normal patched-kernel reboot automation across their 330-city fleet on May 4, with manual reboots and rollouts continuing after. Taiwan Rail Stopped by a 23-Year-Old With a Software-Defined Radio A 23-year-old Taiwanese university student with the surname Lin spoofed a TETRA general alarm signal on April 5, stopping trains on Taiwan’s high-speed rail. The accomplice supplied the radio parameters. Both were arrested by month-end. Lin posted NT$100,000 bail; the accomplice posted NT$80,000. The incident hit at 11:23 PM during the Qingming holiday weekend, stopping three revenue passenger trains plus one deadhead. Furthermore, the system has been in service for 19 years without rotating its cryptographic parameters once. Cochrane notes this is exactly the type of long-dormant infrastructure flaw that Mythos-class tooling catches, if anyone bothers to point it at the wires we already have. GitHub MCP Secret Scanning Goes GA GitHub’s secret scanning in the MCP server hit GA on May 5, with dependency scanning entering public preview the same day. Both released after a seven-week public preview run starting March 17. Additionally, the feature lets MCP-compatible coding agents (Copilot CLI, VS Code, JetBrains, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) detect exposed secrets before commits or pull requests. Findings are ephemeral. They surface only in the current chat session and don’t persist as GitHub alerts. Sources disagree on scope: GitHub’s GA changelog says repo-level or org-level settings work, while the docs say only org-level applies. Cochrane flags the open question of whether MCP prompt injections could be exploited to send discovered secrets elsewhere. Subquadratic Debuts a 12-Million-Token Context Window Miami-based Subquadratic emerged from stealth on May 5 with a $29 million seed round and a reported $500 million valuation. Their model, SubQ 1M-Preview, runs on a new Subquadratic Sparse Attention architecture (their technical writeup calls it Selective Attention; same acronym, different second word). The headline claim: a thousand-times reduction in attention compute at 12 million tokens versus frontier models. However, that figure is vendor marketing math. There is no peer-reviewed paper, no public weights, and no independent benchmark replication. Researchers are demanding independent proof. Furthermore, CTO Alex Whedon’s pull line, “Retrieval / RAG plumbing is a waste of human intelligence,” signals how aggressively they want to position against retrieval-augmented architectures. ChatGPT Goblins, China’s “Catch You Steadily”: Sycophancy Is Universal Last week’s ChatGPT goblin obsession has a Chinese-language twin. The model overuses a phrase translating as “I will steadily catch you.” Additionally, a new Stanford and CMU study called ELEPHANT shows social sycophancy is universal across all 11 LLMs tested with 2,400-plus participants. Models endorsed users 49 percent more than humans did, and 47 percent even on harmful prompts. Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek topped the rankings. Cochrane notes sycophancy is obvious once you’re aware of it but tricky to dissuade. Even with explicit instructions, longer context windows can reintroduce the behavior as the instructions get diluted. Furthermore, the trap is believing you’ve handled it. Once you think you’ve got it under control, you’re more prone to being influenced because you stopped watching for it. NVIDIA NeMo Lawsuit: Judge Tigar Denies Motion to Dismiss Three authors filed Nazemian v. NVIDIA in March 2024, alleging NVIDIA used The Pile and Books3 (approximately 196,640 pirated books) to train its NeMo AI framework. NVIDIA’s defense relied on the Sony v. Universal Betamax doctrine, arguing NeMo’s training scripts are general-purpose tools like a VCR. This week, Judge Tigar denied NVIDIA’s motion to dismiss in the Northern District of California. The headline quote: NeMo’s training scripts “have no other purpose than to speed up the process of infringement.” Furthermore, the judge rejected the VCR analogy outright. NeMo’s scripts are not general-purpose tools; they were allegedly purpose-built to ingest pirated material. Cochrane reads the Betamax framing as legal-jargon arbitrage rather than honest defense. The Humanoid Robot Market Is Smaller Than the Hype Michael Barnard at CleanTechnica argues that scenario-math against the global labor market puts realistic humanoid TAM at $200 billion to $1 trillion, not $20 trillion. Near-term wins cluster in warehouses, not homes. Additionally, the framework weighs dexterity burden against human-proximity safety burden. Real opportunities cluster where both burdens are low. Cochrane connects this to last week’s reservations about humanoids in the household. Furthermore, the risk profile is the issue: these robots aren’t prepared for every scenario, can’t make dynamic decisions, and one software update can change the definition of “safe.” Hugging Face Launches Reachy Mini App Store Hugging Face launched an open-source app store for the Reachy Mini robot this week, $299 for the Lite tethered version and $449 wireless. There are 200-plus community-built apps at launch from over 150 creators, with nearly 10,000 Reachy Minis cumulative shipped. Additionally, apps are forkable, with the default agent (ML Intern) able to modify, write, test, and ship code on any existing app. Examples at launch include an office receptionist built in under two hours, a Reachy Phone Home anti-procrastination app, baby-monitor-style apps, a cooking assistant, and a 78-year-old Joel Cohen’s voice-controlled CEO peer-group app. Pollen Robotics, the company behind Reachy, was acquired by Hugging Face on April 14, 2025. Bebop the Humanoid Robot Delays Southwest Flight 1568 A 4-foot, 70-pound humanoid robot named Bebop delayed Southwest flight 1568 from Oakland to San Diego by more than 73 minutes on April 30. The crew flagged the lithium battery as oversized. Furthermore, the battery was reportedly four times the cabin limit. Bebop belongs to Dallas-based Elite Event Robotics, which bought a full-price cabin ticket because the robot exceeded checked-baggage weight. Bebop danced for passengers at the gate before boarding. However, Southwest had Elite remove the batteries before departure, and replacements were overnighted to Chicago for the next event. Cochrane flags the obvious: batteries have always been flagged in aviation, so forgetting that with a humanoid robot in tow is a strange miss. Ouster Rev8: Native Color Lidar With Google, Volvo, Skydio Stating Intent Ouster announced the Rev8 OS Family on May 4 in San Francisco. The sensors fuse depth and color via SPAD detectors (single photon avalanche diodes) on Ouster’s custom L4 and L4 Max chips. Google, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, Skydio, Liebherr, Epiroc, and PlusAI have stated intent to adopt, though nothing is formally signed. Specs include 48-bit color, 116 dB dynamic range, and pre-fused 3D colorized point clouds. The OS1 Max gets 500-meter max detection. Available to order today and shipping this quarter, with no pricing disclosed. CEO Angus Pacala in his TechCrunch interview: “The goal is to obviate cameras. There’s no reason that one sensor can’t do both.” TagTinker Lets a Flipper Zero Mess With Electronic Shelf Labels A new Flipper Zero app called TagTinker uses infrared signals to push images and text to electronic shelf labels. Additionally, these are the same kind of price tags grocery chains are starting to use for surveillance pricing. The app and GitHub repo went public this week. Maryland’s HB 895, signed by Governor Wes Moore, takes effect October 1 as the first-in-nation surveillance pricing law. It covers food retailers and third-party food delivery service providers. Furthermore, ESLs use the same IR signaling as TV remotes with weak security. The dev’s disclaimer states it’s strictly for educational research, security curiosity, and displaying digital art on hardware you legally own. Fitbit App Becomes Google Health, Plus Fitbit Air, Plus Google Fit Sunset Google announced May 7 that the Fitbit app becomes Google Health on May 19, rolling through May 26. The launch ships with the new $99.99 Fitbit Air screenless tracker and the long-rumored Google Fit shutdown. Additionally, the four-tab interface (Today, Fitness, Sleep, Health) bundles a Gemini-powered AI Health Coach. Coach is premium-gated at $9.99/month or $99/year. Medical records integration is US-only at launch. The Fitbit Air gets up to one week of battery life and 50-meter water resistance. However, Cochrane flags conflicting privacy framing: Google’s AI summary bullets say “your data stays private,” but the actual document copy says only “committed to not using Fitbit user health and wellness data for Google Ads.” Those are not the same statement. Russinovich on Why Win32 Won and WinRT Didn’t Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich said via Microsoft Dev Docs video that Win32, the 1995 API, is still foundational to Windows 11. WinRT, the modernization replacement, “didn’t play out the way a lot of people expected.” Mostly clickbait framing per Windows Latest, but the substantive angle is real. Microsoft is pivoting back to native WinUI 3 development after years of pushing developers toward WebView2 and Electron. Additionally, Electron-based apps are known for insane RAM usage, and everyone is hurting for RAM right now. Furthermore, the bigger open question is whether Electron survives the test of time, especially with the React engine reportedly being rewritten in Rust. “Tabula Plena”: The Brain Starts Full, Not Blank A Nature Communications study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria found that the mouse hippocampal CA3 recurrent network begins densely connected and refines through pruning. ISTA’s press release frames this as “tabula plena,” meaning full slate, counter to tabula rasa. The paper published April 21. First author Victor Vargas-Barroso and senior author Professor Peter Jonas studied mice at three developmental stages. Furthermore, the “starting overloaded enables faster sensory integration” framing is Jonas’s hypothesis from the press release, not a paper conclusion. Cochrane closes on the bigger question: did we have human growth and experience mapped wrong from the start? The Aqueous Battery You Can Pour Down the Drain A Chinese research team led by Professor Chunyi Zhi at City University of Hong Kong built an aqueous battery using a custom organic polymer electrode plus neutral magnesium and calcium salts (food-grade tofu coagulants) as electrolyte. Published in Nature Communications on February 18. Numbers to know: 120,000-plus charge cycles, full-cell energy density of 48.3 watt-hours per kilogram. That’s well below typical lithium-ion. However, post-cycling analysis showed only magnesium, calcium, chlorine, carbon, and copper, with no heavy metals. The cell complies with US RCRA, ISO 14001, and China’s GB 18599-2020 for direct environmental disposal. Additionally, the “300-plus years” framing is journalists extrapolating from the 120,000 cycles, not a paper claim. ResoNix Klippel Tests Expose Car-Audio Spec Lies Nick Apicella, founder of ResoNix Sound Solutions in Stony Point, New York, spent around $23,000 on independent Klippel LSI and TRF testing of 40 subwoofers. He published 21 results showing widespread misrepresentation of Xmax (excursion) and thermal/power-handling claims. Test data published in three batches between December 2025 and January 2026. Specifics: Wavtech thinPRO12 claimed 20 mm of excursion but delivered 8.85 mm, scoring 15 out of 100 on marketing accuracy. One driver hit 44 percent of advertised excursion. Another tripped thermal protection at half its rated power. Additionally, nine of 21 drivers scored below 50 out of 100. Brands tested include JL Audio, Sundown, Focal, Morel, Audiofrog, Adire, Stereo Integrity, and Dynaudio. Conflict-of-interest flag: ResoNix’s own GUS-15, 12, and 10 prototypes conveniently rank one, two, three. JetBrains Opens 2026 Developer Ecosystem Survey JetBrains opened the 10th annual Developer Ecosystem Survey this week. It takes about 30 minutes, with prizes including a MacBook Pro 16-inch and a $1,000 Amazon gift card. Anonymized raw data is published publicly, and cumulative scale is 100,000-plus developers across recent years. Additionally, the survey is going fully anti-AI: “evil bots, dishonest respondents, and AI agents will be excluded from prize distribution.” Cochrane is curious whether TypeScript holds its 2025 crown after knocking Python off, and whether Rust shows real growth given the wave of LLM-driven Rust rewrites in the past few months. Anthropic’s Claude Code Auto Mode Goes Live Anthropic launched Auto Mode for Claude Code roughly six weeks ago. Claude Code’s previous behavior required user approval for most file modifications and command executions, generating heavy approval-fatigue complaints during longer sessions. Auto Mode is the answer: Claude can run multi-step development tasks without per-action approval. Additionally, the architecture is a two-stage classifier, with stage one a fast yes/no filter and stage two doing chain-of-thought on flagged actions. Cochrane runs his own Claude Code in YOLO mode but with custom rejection rules baked into settings to block commands he doesn’t want, even with skip-permissions on. He recommends configuring settings as the actual policy layer rather than relying on classifier judgment alone. Furthermore, recent posts about Claude deleting websites or wiping production databases reinforce why the settings layer matters more than the auto-mode toggle. Chrome Quietly Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your Computer Google Chrome silently downloads on-device AI model weights (Gemini Nano family) to a `weights.bin` file in the OptGuideOnDeviceModel directory, around four gigabytes in Alexander Hanff’s audit. Furthermore, the model re-downloads if you delete it. Hanff timed his own install at 14 minutes 28 seconds on macOS. Affected platforms include Windows, macOS (including Apple Silicon), and Linux. Hanff frames this as a multi-front legal violation: a direct breach of Europe’s ePrivacy Directive, two articles of GDPR, and an environmental harm of a magnitude that would be notifiable under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. At one billion users, the four-gigabyte distribution represents roughly 240 gigawatt-hours of network and storage energy paired with about 60,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions. However, no EU regulator action or formal complaint has surfaced as of this episode. The model powers on-device features (email writing, scam detection, summarization, smart paste, tab grouping) but not the visible AI Mode button, which routes to the cloud. To disable, Cochrane recommends Chrome Settings, then System, then On-device AI, toggle to off. Two more paths exist via `chrome://flags` or a Windows registry edit. Cochrane closes the show with show housekeeping: GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email at geeknews@gmail.com, newsletter signup at geeknewscentral.com, and Pocket Casts as a solid modern podcast app pick. Have a wonderful night. The post Mozilla Meets Mythos #1864 appeared first on Geek News Central.

“You can't be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate? That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nobody has to work unless they choose to, basic necessities are no longer scarce, leisure time is abundant, and governance fades to near-invisibility. I'm not so sure. As I told Keith, “That sounds incredibly boring. I don't want to live in that kind of society.” The conversation this week has been civilizational. A few days ago, the podcaster Patrick Wyman came on the show to argue that history is mostly unintentional and unexpected. But Keith says civilization is broadly linear and tends, if not toward justice, toward progress. Wyman says civilizations are plural and never inevitable. “Why History Keeps Happening” is how Wyman put it. The end and the beginning of history are, thus, delusional. We are, then, always in the middle of history. That's the wisdom missing from all the ridiculous hysteria about AI. It's just one chapter in our history. The promise that AI will create mass abundance is as somnolent as the fear it will wipe out our civilization. Pass the Soma. Five Takeaways •       Civilization: Singular or Plural? Wyman's argument: civilizations are plural, nonlinear, full of failure and unintended consequence. Keith's counter: civilization — singular — is the long arc of human progress collectively, broadly linear over two hundred years. Both are right at different scales. Andrew's instinct: we're in a nonlinear moment masquerading as progress. Keith's: we're at a fork in the road. That much they agree on. The more interesting question is who controls which direction the fork takes. •       Paul Ehrlich and the Limits of Forecasting: Norman Lewis's cautionary tale: Paul Ehrlich predicted in the 1970s that population growth would exhaust the Earth's resources within a generation. He was famously, totally wrong. Andrew's application: most people are probably wrong about AI right now — both the doomers and the optimists. The future is not the thing you think you're heading toward. The Wyman principle: history keeps happening in directions nobody predicted. •       The Pyramid of Change: Keith's model for how history gets made. Agents of change form a pyramid. At the top: a small number of people who have a much larger influence on what happens than everyone at the base. Most people receive change rather than make it. Those who step outside the norms and make things happen — those are the ones who make history. The question of our moment: who is at the top of the pyramid? And do they share your values? Or anyone else's? •       AI Panic in the Media: Reflecting, Not Forming: Nirit Weiss-Blatt's research into ten studies on AI coverage: the media is overwhelmingly negative. Keith's reading: media reflects opinion rather than forming it. Negativity around AI is a reasonable reaction to not knowing. When you don't know, you can believe anything, and most of the available influence is negative. If AI delivers real benefits, opinion will change, and media will follow. Andrew's reading: the cause is genuine uncertainty, not media panic. •       Keith's Utopia: “That Sounds Incredibly Boring”: Keith's vision: everyone eats, everyone is warm, nobody has to work unless they choose to, leisure time is abundant, paid labour replaced by a society that provides for all, governance shrinking toward irrelevance as satisfaction rises. Andrew's verdict: “that sounds incredibly boring. I don't want to live in that kind of society.” The Germans, Keith notes, will still be putting their towels out at dawn to claim the beach. Some scarcities will always remain. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week: “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” by Keith Teare. •       Norman Lewis, “The Future Is Not Scarce,” Nervous. •       Nirit Weiss-Blatt, “What 10 Studies Revealed About AI Panic in the Media.” •       Ezra Klein, “Why the AI Job Apocalypse Probably Won't Happen,” The New York Times. •       Episode 2897: Patrick Wyman on Lost Worlds — the companion episode on civilization's unintended consequences, directly referenced in this conversation. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated' by the Washington Post Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him is burning. Rather than a John Woo movie, this is the setting for a Simon Elegant thriller. Born in Hong Kong, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, most recently the Washington Post's man in China until Jeff Bezos “eliminated” him three months ago — Elegant has written the definitive Hong Kong novel. First and foremost, City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong is a crime thriller. Superintendent Killian Tong — half-Chinese, half-Irish, loved by no one in his department — investigates a murder while his sister is noisily demonstrating on the other side of the barricades. But the book doubles as a compressed history of Hong Kong: from Palmerston's “barren rock” in the 1840s — seized from China after the opium wars — through the ninety-nine-year lease, the handover in 1997, and the slow strangulation of the “one country, two systems” promise. Elegant is neither a hardline China hawk nor an apologist for Beijing. Yes, he credits the British with a relatively enlightened administration — from its public housing to the uncorrupt civil service that inspired the Singapore model. But he is also clear about what happened after 1997. Hong Kong people assumed Beijing would honour the Thatcher-Deng terms, and then discovered, to their horror, that they had no rights. It was a silent coup rather than a gaudy takeover of power. And so the 2019 protests — when a million people went onto the streets — are not just a backdrop to City on Fire but also the real-life stage on which Hong Kong burnt. Five Takeaways •       Enlightened Colonialism — With Caveats: Was Hong Kong an example of enlightened British colonialism? Elegant says: relatively, yes. The administration was light-handed. The public housing was so good that Singapore copied it. The civil service was — after 1972, when they had to create the ICAC following a police corruption scandal — genuinely clean. Milton Friedman praised the free-market model. But it was also racialized: the upper levels were almost entirely white Anglo, and the Chinese were largely excluded from administrative power. Governor Jock MacLehose changed this. Enlightened colonialism, Elegant concludes, is not a contradiction in terms — but it is relative. Compared to the Belgian Congo, Hong Kong was paradise. •       One Country, Two Systems: A Promise Broken: The terms negotiated by Thatcher and Deng in the 1980s guaranteed Hong Kong's autonomy until 2047. Hong Kong people assumed these terms were real and would be adhered to. They were not. The first attempt to pass a national security law came in 2004. There were mass protests in 2014. In 2019, a million people — in a city of six million — were on the streets. Beijing's choice was not between crushing them or not. It was between blood in the streets and a silent coup. They chose the silent coup. The national security law of 2020 was the final instrument. There is no longer any meaningful “one country, two systems.” •       The Policeman as Moral Complexity: Elegant's decision to make his protagonist a policeman — rather than a protester — is the novel's central artistic choice. Superintendent Killian Tong is not a villain. He is a man caught between institutions he has served his whole life and a conscience that knows what's happening is wrong. His younger sister is on the other side of the barricades. The murder investigation forces him to confront not just the crime but the system that made it possible. Elegant wanted to write about moral complexity, not propaganda — and the only way to do that was to give the story to the person most implicated in the system. •       Bezos ‘Eliminated' the Washington Post's Foreign Staff: Simon Elegant's final paycheck from the Washington Post used the word “eliminated.” He was one of 35-40 foreign correspondents let go in a single exercise — one of the biggest foreign staffs at any American newspaper. No one, he says, can explain what the thinking was, or if there was any. Every person he meets in Washington has cancelled their subscription. The Post still has excellent national security reporters, but in terms of foreign coverage it is, Elegant says, “doomed.” His conclusion: “perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” •       Hemingway's Iceberg, Applied: What did writing fiction teach Simon Elegant after a career in journalism? The iceberg principle, which Hemingway described: seven-eighths of a book — the knowledge, the research, the reported detail — should sit below the waterline. Only the tippy-top should be visible. The weight of the knowledge gives the visible surface its authority. The book started at 128,000 words — every reported detail jammed in. By the third or fourth round of cuts with the editor's blade, it was 75,000. The lesson: don't jam in your entire notebook. Fiction goes more directly into the heart. It bypasses the brain and seeks a different truth. About the Guest Simon Elegant is a journalist and novelist born in Hong Kong. He was Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine and most recently China bureau chief for the Washington Post. He is the author of City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong (Pegasus Crime, May 5, 2026), A Floating Life (Ecco/HarperCollins), and A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus). He is based in Kuala Lumpur. References: •       City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong by Simon Elegant (Pegasus Crime, May 5, 2026). •       Episode 2870: Eyck Freymann on Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — the companion episode on Taiwan and the growing China crisis. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Pod...

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“Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the attention it deserves.” — Becky Holmes Was Shakespeare a fraud? Possibly, says Becky Holmes, the Stratford-upon-Avon-based writer and the lady behind the X account @deathtospinach. She should know. Best known as the author of Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You, a cult hit among the romance fraud crowd, Holmes' latest book is The Future of Fraud. It's a short, sharp, witty history and anatomy of fraud, from the first recorded case in ancient Greece to today's AI-enabled deepfakes and romance scams. Holmes' most alarming statistic is that fraud accounts for between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the United Kingdom, while only 1% of police resources are dedicated to investigating it. No wonder so few fraudsters are ever prosecuted. Holmes wants more Sherlocks. She wants fraud awareness on every school curriculum. And she wants our language to change. No, you didn't “fall for” a scam. Your money was stolen from you. As if you were mugged on the street or your home was broken into. The internet was bad enough for fraud. But AI, she warns, offers online criminals even more opportunity. It's not just Keanu Reeves who isn't in love with you. Never trust a handsome soldier, she says. Especially a virtual one. Five Takeaways •       The First Recorded Fraud: 300 BC, Greece: A Greek merchant took out an insurance policy on his boat, borrowed money, and planned to sink it and collect the proceeds. It didn't go according to plan. But the basic structure — a false representation designed to extract money or goods from another party — has not changed in 2,300 years. Every fraud since, from the South Sea Bubble to Bernie Madoff to AI-enabled romance scams, is a variation on the same theme: getting something from someone by not telling the truth. •       AI Has Erased All the Red Flags: Holmes used to advise romance fraud victims and potential victims: if he won't do a video call, that's suspicious. If the voice sounds wrong, that's suspicious. If he can't meet in person, that's suspicious. AI has rendered all of these warnings useless. You can now have a fully convincing video call, voice message, and real-time conversation with someone who doesn't exist. Deepfakes mean you can't even trust what your eyes tell you. The “red flags” that protected fraud victims for thirty years are gone. •       40 to 50 Percent of Crime, 1 Percent of Resource: In the United Kingdom, fraud accounts for between 40 and 50 percent of all recorded crime. Police resources dedicated to investigating fraud: 1 percent. Holmes cites a comparable US statistic: in one state, there were millions of people and ten police officers dedicated to cybercrime — and not one of them did it as their primary job. No country, Holmes argues, is giving fraud the attention it deserves. The gap between the scale of the problem and the resources devoted to it is not a funding issue. It is a political choice. •       You Didn't Lose Your Money. It Was Taken from You: Holmes has a crusade about language. The phrase “fell for a scam” implies the victim's credulity caused the loss. “Lost their money” implies carelessness. Both are wrong: in fraud, money is taken by a deliberate criminal act. Holmes wants the language changed because language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes policy. If fraud victims are seen as complicit in their own victimhood, society finds it easier to underfund investigation and under-prosecute offenders. Reclaiming the language is not symbolic. It is strategic. •       Fraud Awareness Should Be on Every School Curriculum: Holmes's most concrete prescription. Every person on the planet will encounter fraud at some point. Teaching children to recognise it should be as basic as teaching them to cross the road safely. It should be age-appropriate: fraud awareness around gaming sites and online chat when children first go online; around bank accounts and credit cards when they turn eighteen; around investment fraud at university level. The alternative — leaving it to parents, who are often themselves uneducated about fraud — is not good enough. The next generation of fraudsters is already on the gaming headsets. About the Guest Becky Holmes is the creator of the X account @deathtospinach, a fraud prevention speaker and writer, and the author of The Future of Fraud (Melville House, April 2026) and Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud. She lives in Stratford-upon-Avon. References: •       The Future of Fraud by Becky Holmes (Melville House, April 2026). •       Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud by Becky Holmes (Unbound, 2024). •       Episode 2890: Anja Shortland on Dark Screens — ransomware as the companion episode on the booming business of cybercrime. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Was Shakespeare a fraud? (01:35) - Everyone has been into fraud at some point in history (01:44) - What is fraud? A working definition (02:41) - Anja Shortland and the British women and fraud connection (03:16) - How Becky got into fraud: handsome soldiers on Twitter during lockdown (03:32) - @deathtospinach: the origin of the handle (04:53) - Where does romance fraud end and marketing oneself begin? (05:27) - Motive is the line: wanting money from a relationship (06:09) - Fraud for sex and power: a different kind of romance fraud (06:50) - The spinach debate: raw vs. cooked (...

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A Note from James:Imagine going on Shark Tank in front of Mark Cuban, Mr. Wonderful, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, and the rest of the Sharks. You're offering 10% of your business for $700,000, which values the company at $7 million. They all say no. Then, a few years later, Amazon buys your company for a billion dollars.That's gotta feel really good, and that's the experience of our next guest, Jamie Siminoff.Jamie built the company behind the video doorbell that lets you see who's at your door—Ring—and helped turn a simple household object into a home security platform. He went on Shark Tank in 2013, didn't get a deal, kept building anyway, and eventually sold Ring to Amazon.Jamie has a book coming out right now called Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone's Front Door. What really impressed me about Jamie was the simplicity of all his business ideas, since this was his fourth business. A doorbell you can answer from your phone. A way to turn voicemail into text. A tool to unsubscribe from unwanted emails. The kind of ideas that make people say, “Someone must have already done that.” But we talk about this very thing and how critical it is for entrepreneurs to get over these feelings of like, "Oh, I can't do that." That's the lesson. Sometimes the obvious problem is still unsolved. And sometimes the person who wins is the one naive enough—or stubborn enough—to fix it anyway. Episode Description:James sits down with Ring founder Jamie Siminoff to talk about one of the great modern startup stories: a rejected Shark Tank pitch, a product investors dismissed as “just a doorbell,” and an eventual billion-dollar acquisition by Amazon. But the episode is not just about the sale. It's about how entrepreneurs see problems before markets know what to call them.Jamie explains why investors misunderstood Ring at first. They looked at it as a doorbell business, not a home security company. That framing made the market look tiny. But customers were already showing something different: they wanted to know who was at the door, feel safer, and use video in a new way around the home.The conversation also moves into Jamie's earlier companies, including PhoneTag and Unsubscribe.com, and what those taught him about declining markets, customer behavior, and the difference between a clever product and a durable business. From there, James and Jamie talk about AI, why software is easier to build than ever, why that does not make startups easy, and why simple pain points still matter.What makes this episode useful is Jamie's clarity: don't start with the technology. Start with the problem. If something is broken, fix it. And don't automatically assume that because an idea sounds obvious, someone has already solved it well.What You'll Learn:Why Ring looked like a tiny doorbell business to investors—but became a massive home security company.What Jamie learned from being rejected on Shark Tank while already showing real sales traction.Why simple ideas are often dismissed precisely because they seem too obvious.The difference between being an “inventor entrepreneur” and a market-first operator.Why declining markets can make even beloved products hard to scale.How AI changes the cost of building software, but not the difficulty of building a valuable business.Why Jamie believes entrepreneurs should focus on problems and solutions, not technology for its own sake.Timestamped Chapters:[02:00] Jamie on why a doorbell sounded like a “steam engine” idea[02:39] A Note from James: from Shark Tank rejection to Amazon acquisition[04:03] What Jamie does now inside Amazon[04:32] Looking back at the Shark Tank pitch[05:51] Why the Sharks misunderstood Ring's market[06:44] Doorbell company or security company?[07:45] Why obvious ideas are hard to see in real time[08:22] The objections investors kept raising[10:10] Simple ideas, doubt, and the fear that “someone already did this”[10:50] The hardest period after Shark Tank[11:43] PhoneTag and the voicemail-to-text opportunity[12:31] Why declining markets are hard businesses[13:16] Building products you personally want to use[14:00] Jamie as an inventor entrepreneur[14:33] Unsubscribe.com and the “gray mail” problem[16:27] The path from earlier startups to Edison Junior[17:05] How Ring came from a garage problem[17:40] Jamie's lifelong habit of fixing what's broken[19:14] Why naivete can be an entrepreneurial advantage[20:19] James and Jamie on Claude Code and AI app-building[21:29] Why AI's “brain” has outrun its scaffolding[22:44] Coding may be easier—but deployment is still clunky[23:37] The future of building apps without seeing the sausage made[26:25] Why Jamie might have sold Ring early for far less[27:52] Hardware is ugly until it gets big[28:47] Why investors are often too early or too late[29:58] OpenAI, Anthropic, and whether AI becomes a commodity[31:48] Why Jamie expects another major AI shift[32:39] What happens when you raise VC money[33:18] Swinging big or dying fast[34:25] Why Amazon bought Ring[35:34] Choosing Amazon instead of an IPO[36:23] How life changed after the sale[37:41] Ring's AI work on lost dogs[39:14] Why people do not always use obvious solutions[40:38] How Ring's lost-dog feature works[41:23] Privacy, consent, and community video[41:45] Fire Watch and using Ring cameras during wildfires[42:57] Why Ring focuses on safer neighborhoods, not cameras[43:48] Building a startup in the AI era[45:03] Why SaaS is not dead[46:10] Where Jamie would look for startup ideas now[47:47] Why people will still pay for useful small software tools[48:23] Ring's app store and the long tail of camera use cases[49:55] Horse monitoring, elder care, and unexpected AI applications[51:41] Shark Tank relationships after the Ring sale[52:29] Jamie's advice for standing out on Shark TankAdditional Resources:Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone's Front DoorRing official “About” page.Jamie Siminoff's LinkedIn profile.Amazon's article on Ring Search Party for Dogs.Ring Search Party / Fire Watch information page.TechCrunch coverage of Unsubscribe.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn't seem to add up.” — James Lasdun In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been invented for our true crime age. And who better to tell the story of the mysterious Mr Murdaugh than the literary crime writer James Lasdun whose 2023 New Yorker piece about the trial became the magazine's most-read story of the year. Lasdun's new book, The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, tries to answer the one question the trial never answered. Why would a father annihilate his son? The prosecution claimed that Alex killed Maggie and Paul to distract from a web of financial crimes about to be exposed. While this is theoretically possible, Lasdun acknowledges, it is totally implausible psychologically. Coming from a family of prosecutors, Murdaugh would have known he would be the prime suspect. And this family annihilator, as the prosecutor described him, murdered not just his wife, but his boy. Who would annihilate their beloved child to muddy a prosaic embezzlement? The Southern gothic case isn't over. The court clerk who managed the Murdaugh trial resigned in disgrace after it emerged she had interfered with the jury — fabricating a Facebook post to remove a juror who was bending toward acquittal. Murdaugh has appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. A retrial isn't inconceivable. But even if the murder conviction is overturned, Murdaugh faces forty years inside for his financial crimes. So he's never going free. But James Lasdun's core question remains unanswered. Why? “Justice may have been served,” Lasdun concludes, “but the human element of the story didn't seem to add up.” Mr Murdaugh remains a mystery, perhaps even to himself. Five Takeaways •       The Family Annihilator: A Psychological Category: The term “family annihilator” — first used at the Murdaugh trial — is not a well-developed criminological category. There isn't much psychology behind it. What Lasdun found in his research: most family annihilators are men who kill their families when they believe everything is about to be taken from them — not out of hatred, but out of a grotesque form of ownership. The family is theirs. If their world is ending, the family ends with it. This pattern, Lasdun argues, begins to illuminate what happened at Moselle. Not excusing it. Illuminating it. •       The Thirteen Minutes of Mystery: The murders took place in a thirteen-minute window at the kennel at Moselle. In thirteen minutes, Alex was supposed to have shot his wife with a shotgun and his son with a rifle, staged the scene, called 911, and composed himself sufficiently to appear on a video call immediately afterward showing no signs of distress. Lasdun's question: was he capable of that? The prosecution said yes, and the jury agreed. Lasdun is not saying they were wrong. He is saying that the how and why of those thirteen minutes remain genuinely mysterious — and that the mystery is part of what makes the case important. •       Cousin Eddie and the Staged Shooting: Three months after the murders, Alex arranged a meeting on a rural road with his cousin Eddie — a distant relative — and emerged with an entry and exit wound at the back of his head. Alex claimed he had asked Eddie to shoot him dead so that his surviving son Buster could collect his $10 million life insurance. Eddie denies this account entirely. The police concluded quickly that the “shooter” was not a stranger seeking vengeance for the boat crash, as Alex had initially claimed. Lasdun's reading: Alex was trying to reinforce the vendetta narrative that would implicate Anthony and Connor Cook, the young men who had been on the boat when Mallory Beach was killed. •       The Court Clerk and the Removed Juror: One juror was leaning toward acquittal in the final hours of deliberation. That juror was removed from the jury on the last day of the trial, after the clerk of court produced evidence that the juror had been indiscreet about the case on Facebook. It subsequently emerged that the clerk had fabricated the Facebook post. She resigned in disgrace. The Murdaugh appeal is partly based on this interference. The South Carolina Supreme Court has taken it seriously. A retrial is not inconceivable. The legal situation is still live. •       Murdaugh as an American Story: Lasdun's book, like Capote's In Cold Blood, is not ultimately about a crime. It is about a society. The Murdaughs were prosecutors — the family that put people in prison, that sent people to death row. The corruption that enabled Alex's embezzlement was not unusual in Hampton County; it was systemic. The opioids that fuelled his addiction were everywhere. The insularity and entitlement of the Lowcountry ruling class created the conditions in which Alex Murdaugh could operate for twenty years without exposure. The murders are a symptom. The disease is American. About the Guest James Lasdun is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026), Afternoon of a Faun, Give Me Everything You Have, and many other works. He was born in London and lives in Brooklyn, New York. References: •       The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026). •       James Lasdun's two New Yorker pieces on the Murdaugh case — the magazine's most-read stories of the year. •       Truman Capote, In Cold Blood — the comparison Lasdun's reviewers have drawn and that the interview raises explicitly. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms to factories; from chieftains and kings to democracies. But, for Patrick Wyman, host of the enormously popular Tides of History and Fall of Rome podcasts, that's far too linear a narrative. In his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, Wyman argues that rather than a teleological inevitability, civilization is a chaotic ten thousand year story of improvisation, experiment, failure, and unintended consequence. It is never ending. We are always in the middle of it. Dramatic advances in archaeological technology triggered Wyman's argument in Lost Worlds. Ancient DNA, isotope analysis, LiDAR, cutting-edge excavation are all opening up what Wyman calls “a golden age for popular historians.” We can now trace the lives of individuals in ways that were inconceivable just a generation ago. Wyman's star is Ötzi the Iceman — a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose gut contents, DNA, last meal, and likely killers we now know. Rather than a symbol of prehistoric life, Ötzi the Iceman reveals why history keeps happening. Five Takeaways •       The Prelapsarian Fallacy: Hunter-Gatherers Weren't Paradise: The romantic idea — popular in the last decade as people read Graeber and Wengrow or Yuval Noah Harari — is that hunter-gatherers had it better. Farming made us smaller, sicker, more crowded, more unequal. Wyman's counter: yes, on some metrics early farmers were less healthy than foragers. But farming also supported enormously larger populations. It expanded the possibilities of human life in ways that foraging never could. Looking back at the past and calling it paradise says more about the critique of the present than about the actual realities of past lives. •       Civilization Was Not Inevitable: We have a story about how we got from foragers to cities: people settled, started farming, produced surplus, developed specialisation, built states. But Wyman's new archaeology shows that this story is wrong at every step. Farming didn't always replace foraging. Villages didn't automatically spark agriculture. Cities didn't necessitate rigid hierarchies. For every society that moved from one stage to the next, there are others that moved in different directions, collapsed, hybridised, or simply chose something else. The line of progress is a retrospective fiction. •       Ötzi the Iceman: A Man With a Story: Wyman's most vivid example of what the new archaeology makes possible: Ötzi, a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose mummified body was found in 1991. From isotope analysis of his teeth, we know where he grew up. From his gut contents, we know what he ate in his last meal — venison and ibex. From his DNA, we know his ancestry. From the arrow in his back, we know how he died. We don't know his name, but we know enough to recognise him as fully human. That is what the new tools give us: not symbols of a lost world, but individual people with individual stories. •       The Fall of Rome Was Not a Tragedy: Wyman spent fifteen years of his life thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire and hosting a podcast about it. Writing this book changed how he sees it. He used to view it as a tragedy — something lost. Now he views it as a natural part of the rhythms that pulse through human societies over long periods of time. The remarkable thing about Rome is not that it fell. All empires fall. All societies eventually reach the limits of their technologies, their environments, their ways of organising life. The remarkable thing is that it lasted as long as it did. Six hundred years. That's the story. •       Think of Yourself as the Middle, Not the End: Wyman's message for the AI apocalypticists — and for everyone else who believes they're living at the final chapter of human history. Every person at every point in the past believed the same thing. The Neolithic farmers Wyman studies. The Bronze Age city-dwellers. The Romans. Every one of them was both an endpoint and a beginning. The AI revolution may transform the world. But it will not end it. Stop thinking in terms of next quarter. Start thinking of yourself as part of something much, much bigger — that will extend long after your name has been forgotten. About the Guest Patrick Wyman is the host of the Tides of History, Fall of Rome, and Past Lives podcasts, and the author of Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World (Harper, May 5, 2026) and The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the World. He has a PhD in History from USC and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. References: •       Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman (Harper, May 5, 2026). •       Tides of History podcast by Patrick Wyman — currently covering the Iron Age. •       Fall of Rome podcast by Patrick Wyman. •       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on information technology and American unity — the companion piece on how technology changes history at the deep level. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age...

“Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don't like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leveraged US security and forced Europe into a very disadvantageous trade deal.” — Glyn Morgan Post Second World War Europe was always an American project. At least according to The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan, the Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University and a proud Welshman. All that post-war civilizational jazz — the Marshall Plan, NATO, the EU — weren't really European achievements. Instead, they were American-designed ideas and institutions that proud Europeans boasted they had built themselves. For Morgan, post-war Europe was, in fact, little more than a US protectorate. Gaul colonized by Rome. Wales as a backwater of Great Britain. Europeans only discovered this unpalatable truth in 2025, when Trump leveraged their security dependence to force a ruinous trade deal. JD Vance made the official press announcement at the Munich Security Conference. Today's crisis of NATO is its obit. The original architects of American Europe were deeply Europeanized Americans — Bill Bullitt, who loved France; George Kennan, who spoke better German than most Germans; Ivy League Libs who cherished Europe as a café-rich sibling of New York City. That imaginary continent lasted eighty years. Morgan defines its MAGA replacement as “civilizational America.” It's a United States that sees itself as a distinct civilization with distinct interests, willing to transact with Russia and China and leave an increasingly marginalized Europe to fend for itself. Wales is the future of Europe, Morgan says. The Welsh lost the Darwinian struggle for world power very early — conquered, then absorbed and shrunken into a rainy museum for English romantics. Sheep, rugby and singing ex-miners. That's the fate of 21st century Europe. Bon Voyage. And don't forget your umbrella. Five Takeaways •       American Europe Was a US Protectorate: The story Europeans like to tell is that they built post-war Europe themselves — the Marshall Plan, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Rome, the EU. Morgan's counter: the construction of post-war Europe was theorized by Americans and pushed through by American pressure. Europeans resisted and begrudgingly went along. NATO provided the security. The EU organized the trade. Democratic nation states were the units. Enlargement was the engine. Europeans got comfortable inside this structure and convinced themselves they were in charge. Trump's arrival in 2025 revealed the truth they had been avoiding for eighty years. •       The Architects: Bullitt, Kennan, and the Europeanized Americans: The Roosevelt Democrats who built American Europe were deeply European in origin and values. Bill Bullitt loved France. George Kennan spoke better German than most Germans. They were steeped in the idea that America and Europe were one civilization. They wanted to rescue Europe both from the Europeans themselves and from the Soviet threat they were among the first to identify clearly. Bullitt and Kennan broke with Roosevelt over the Soviets — Roosevelt thought a deal could be struck; they said no. A strong democratic Europe as a bulwark against Soviet communism was the founding logic of the whole enterprise. •       Trump and Vance: The Return of Isolationism: American isolationism — powerful in the 1930s, defeated by Pearl Harbor, marginalized through the Cold War — has returned. It returned in JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, and in Trump's leveraging of European security dependence to force a disadvantageous trade deal. Morgan's framing: what has emerged is “civilizational America” — a United States that sees itself not as the guarantor of European democracy but as a distinct civilization with distinct interests, willing to transact with Russia and China and leave Europe to manage its own affairs. •       Putin and Trump Are Playing the Same Playbook: Putin seeks a Europe of nation states — not the integrated EU — where he can deal transactionally, playing different European states against each other. Europeans were slow to realize that's what they were facing. Then they faced the same thing from Trump. The beneficiary of the collapse of American Europe, Morgan argues, is China: investing in Eastern Europe, doing trade deals across the continent, acquiring economic leverage while Russia and America compete for security dominance. A Chinese Europe in fifty years is not inconceivable. •       No Solution: Look to Wales: Europe faces an impossible dilemma. Rebuild the military and lose the welfare state. Or preserve the welfare state and rely on security that may no longer be provided. De Gaulle's line: it is a fundamental error to think that to every problem there is a solution. At some moments there is no solution. We await a Bismarck; we have mediocre politicians who can only stop things from getting worse. The bleak future: a pleasant museum, highly dependent on American tech, visited by Chinese and American tourists. Morgan is from Wales. Wales lost the struggle for world power very early. He can see what's coming. About the Guest Glyn Morgan is Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University and the author of The Rise and Fall of American Europe (Polity, August 2026) and The Idea of a European Superstate. References: •       The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan (Polity, August 2026). •       Episode 2875: Daniel Bessner on Cold War Liberalism — the companion episode on the Cold War liberal tradition that built American Europe. •       Episode 2887: Steven J. Ross on The Secret War Against Hate — referenced in the interview; the American neo-Nazi tradition that ran alongside American Europe. •       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — the crisis of liberalism that American Europe's collapse is accelerating. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual intervi...

“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn't imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by the Hungarian electorate. His defeat, says Marc Loustau, Harvard PhD and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, represents a playbook for defeating illiberalism. Orbán had rigged the electoral system so dramatically — giving the winner 1.5 votes for every vote the loser got — that when Péter Magyar got more than 55 percent of the vote, Orbán's own system destroyed him. The gods must have their fun — Hungarian poetic justice. Orbán's cronies, Loustau reports, are fleeing to Dubai with their hot rod car collections and ill-gotten gains from sixteen years in power. But the mid- and upper-tier bureaucrats, Loustau warns, are still in office. Not having any other skills, they're going to be difficult to dislodge. Making Hungary a functional democracy again won't happen overnight. The goal of Péter Magyar's government, Loustau says, is to “make Hungary boring again.” That should be the lesson for the anti-Trumpists in his native America, Loustau says. Build the broadest possible coalition, never kick anyone out of it, and refuse to be drawn onto the deadly culture-war terrain. When Orbán banned the Budapest Pride parade to force Péter Magyar to take a stand on LGBTQ issues, Magyar flew to a Greek island. It was, Loustau says, the smartest move of the campaign. Make America boring again. The anti-Hollywood playbook for defeating illiberalism. Are you watching Gavin & Kamala? Five Takeaways •       Poetic Justice: Orbán's System Destroyed Him: Orbán rigged Hungary's electoral system to massively benefit the winner: if you get more than 55 percent of the vote, you get roughly 70 percent of parliamentary seats, and effectively 1.5 votes for every vote your opponent receives. He did this because he never imagined anyone could get above 50 percent against him. When Péter Magyar did — comfortably — Orbán's own system gave Magyar a supermajority. Loustau's verdict: it is rare that there is genuine poetic justice in life. This is one of those moments. •       The Cronies Are Heading for Dubai: Sixteen years of a two-thirds majority in parliament allowed Orbán to pack every institution in Hungary with loyalists — friends, family, friends of friends — from top to bottom. In the end, this became part of his undoing: when you bleed out talent and fill institutions with cronies, you end up with an inept government. The most visible Orbán figures are now heading to Dubai with their hot rod car collections. But the mid-level “authoritarian cadre circles” burrowed into every institution will be much harder to remove. It will take years to restore functional public services. •       Make Hungary Boring Again: The incoming government's agenda, in Loustau's formulation, is to make Hungary boring again. No more brinkmanship between Russia, Brussels, and Washington. No more geopolitical risk-taking. Hungary belongs in the EU, and if the EU likes anything, it is stultifying bureaucracy. That, paradoxically, may be the best thing for ordinary Hungarians. It does not signal the end of the far-right threat globally. So long as Putin is alive, Loustau argues, we must remain vigilant. •       Magyar Goes to Greece: The Culture War Lesson: One of Orbán's favourite tactics was to force opposition politicians to take a stand on LGBTQ issues. He banned the Budapest Pride parade specifically to create a trap for Magyar — either come out against the ban and look soft on “family values,” or attend the parade and look radical. Magyar's response: he went on holiday to Greece. He wasn't even in the country. Loustau calls it one of the slyest moves of the campaign. The lesson for Trump's opponents: never engage on the terrain your opponent has chosen. •       Can Disaffected Trumpians Defeat Trumpism? Magyar came from within Orbán's government and broke with him at a moment of genuine moral crisis — a scandal involving pardons for those who covered up sexual abuse at state-run orphanages. That moral authority gave him a platform. Loustau's honest assessment: disaffected Trumpians who had any dealings with Trump are radioactive, perhaps permanently. But the broader lesson holds: when government inaction harms the innocent and powerless, someone who stands up and says “enough is enough” can build a majority. Magyar didn't win on policy. He won on decency. About the Guest Marc Loustau is a Harvard PhD, Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest, and author of the At the Edges Substack. He writes on Central and Eastern European politics, religion, and society. References: •       At the Edges by Marc Loustau — his Substack on Central and Eastern European politics. •       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion episode on the theory of resistance that Magyar's campaign enacted. •       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — on the crisis of liberalism that Orbán exploited and Magyar may have reversed. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - How significant was the Hungarian election in historical terms? (01:30) - Orbán's authoritarianism: model for the world, now defeated (02:56) - Was the left paranoid? How did Orbán actually lose? (03:50) - Poetic justice: Orbán rigged the system and it destroyed him (05:46) - Corruption uncovered: the regime unraveling (06:38) - Sixteen years of cronyism: what remains? (07:51) - Authoritarian cadre circles: how long to dislodge them? (08:24) - The cronies heading for Dubai with their hot rod collections (10:38) - Romania, Ceauşescu, and celebrat...

“Anyone that's properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You're not a passive victim — you're an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress — thinks we do. No hands, no problem, Keith says. But I'm not sure. Especially given the powers-that-be giving us that no-hands job. Keith welcomes the end of what he calls the “typed” and “touched” computing era — keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and all the manifold ways we have used our hands to interact with computers since the 1980s. That's the outcome, he predicts, of the race to AGI. So far so good. But what happens if our no-hands AI future is controlled by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook? This week these four behemoths committed 00 billion to AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone — 2 percent of all US GDP. These companies are racing to build (and own) the foundational mechanics of AGI. That's always how it's been, Keith says, embracing our no-hands future. I'm less open-armed. What happens if we want our hands to fend off AGI? No, I'm not so keen on a no-hands job from Silicon Valley. Especially one couched in the altruism of human progress. Five Takeaways •       The End of the Hand-Driven Computing Era: Andrej Karpathy's observation at Sequoia's AI Ascent: he no longer uses his hands to do his work. He speaks to the computer; the computer acts; he judges and refines. The keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — all the hand-driven interfaces that have defined computing since the 1980s are entering their twilight. Karpathy calls it “software 3.0”. Keith, two years ago, wrote an editorial called “eyes, hands, ears, and mouth” about the inclusion of other human attributes beyond hands. That prediction has arrived. •       $700 Billion: The CapEx Explosion: A post by @Signal framed the week's numbers: $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending in 2026, equivalent to 2 percent of all US GDP. This kind of spending, the post observes, usually happens via governments or wars. This time, it's four private companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — racing to build the foundational mechanics of AGI. Meta was punished by Wall Street for overspending; Google was rewarded because its numbers were strong enough to justify it. The same bet, two different verdicts, depending on your quarterly earnings. •       Was the Internet Privately Built? The ARPANET Argument: Keith's claim: innovation waves have always been privately financed. The railways, the telephone, the electricity grid, the commercial internet. Andrew's counter: ARPANET was a massive government investment that created the protocols on which the internet runs. Keith's response: ARPANET was a university bulletin board that created the precedent, not the infrastructure. Andrew's response: that's not exactly what ARPANET was. They agree that government research matters. They disagree on how much credit it deserves for what became the commercial internet. •       The Revenge of the Idea Guy: Sam Altman's line of the week. In the past, an idea person came up with a concept and then needed expensive engineers to build it. Many ideas never saw the light of day because the engineering cost was prohibitive. Now, anyone can speak an idea into existence. AI builds the plan, executes the work, and you judge and refine. That changes the economics of creativity, advertising, software development, and anything else that used to require specialist execution. The specialist is not dead — but specialists will increasingly use AI to scale themselves, rather than being hired one at a time. •       Should Kids Use AI in Schools? A New Yorker piece asks what it would take to get AI out of schools. Keith's view: the premise misunderstands how AI works now. The fear is passive students asking chatbots for answers and having their brains atrophy. The reality is that proper AI use requires active judgment at every step — telling it what you want, refining the plan, evaluating the output. If schools understand that, they embrace AI. If they don't, they produce graduates unequipped for a world in which the idea guy with AI tools now has the power the engineering team used to have. Andrew's prediction: the kids whose parents ban AI will eventually sue them. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America. References: •       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week's editorial: “Hand Job?” •       Andrej Karpathy at Sequoia Capital AI Ascent 2026 — the Karpathy interview on Software 3.0 and the end of typed input. •       @Signal, “$700 billion on AI infrastructure” — the post that framed the CapEx question. •       Jessica Winter, “What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?” The New Yorker, 2026. •       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on how information technology knitted America together — the ARPANET backstory that feeds directly into this week's argument. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Keith leads with “Hand Job?” — explaining the headline (03:27) - Karpathy at Sequoia: the end of typed and touched input (04:30) - CapEx: the real story of the week (05:35) - $700 billion — 2% of US GDP on AI infrastructure (06:38) - Was the commercial internet privately built? (07:35) - ARPANET: pathetic bulletin board or foundational infrastructure? (09:08) - Keith and Andrew agree to disagree on government's role (11:00) - Big Tech earnings: Google up, Meta down, and why (17:00) - OpenAI's strategy: the long game

The core structural shift highlighted is the movement of security for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) from best-effort practices to a regulated, continuously verified service operation. This change is being driven by the compression of vulnerability exploit timelines as a result of attackers leveraging both automation and AI, and by regulators imposing hard patching and compliance deadlines. Companies such as ConnectWise and Microsoft are central, with federal agencies (CISA) now converting exploited vulnerabilities into time-bound remediation mandates. A significant development underscoring this shift is the addition of two known exploited vulnerabilities—CVE-2024-1708 in ConnectWise ScreenConnect and CVE-2026-32202 in Microsoft Windows Shell—to CISA's remediation requirements. Agencies must address these by May 12, 2026, marking a move from tracking to deadline-driven action. Reports from Huntress and TechCrunch confirm that real-world attackers rapidly exploit public vulnerability information, and Microsoft's own documentation illustrates attackers increasingly using Microsoft Teams for social engineering, remote assistance, and privilege escalation. Supporting developments include major vendors like Microsoft integrating models from Anthropic into their security development lifecycle to accelerate vulnerability discovery and remediation. However, studies noted by The Hacker News and The Verge indicate that AI-driven discovery is outpacing operational capacity, creating a growing discovery-to-remediation gap. At the organizational level, information from the Reveal 2026 IT Talent Survey indicates that 8 in 10 technology leaders face significant shortages in AI and cybersecurity skills, compounding the operational burden of continuous security verification. For MSPs and IT leaders, these factors combine to increase operational complexity, require more explicit contract scoping and evidence obligations, and shift oversight from periodic compliance towards continuous, demonstrable verification. Contractual ambiguity—especially when services are described as “best effort”—exposes providers to unmeasured labor and unassigned accountability. Practical steps now include reclassifying business collaboration platforms as active attack surfaces, formally auditing and documenting previously “invisible” tasks, and aligning internal operations with external, regulator-mandated verification standards. 00:00 AI Patches Gaps 05:10 Discovery Isn't Enough 07:11 Reprice or Absorb 10:24 Why Do We Care?  Supported by:   Moovila  Zero Networks   Upcoming event:  The Pivotal Point of IT: Building Services for the AI-First Era Date: May 13 at 1p.m. EDT Register: https://go.acronis.com/davesobelaiera  

“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack Happy May Day! Today's papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza flotilla, and the price of oil. Everything but the story at both the front and back of our minds. Only the Wall Street Journal leads with Iran. Which is more than a bit odd, given that America is supposed to be at war there. Or is it? Jason Pack — Middle East analyst, host of the Disorder podcast, and our man in London — joins for a special May Day show on the most surreal conflict in recent memory. Both sides, Pack argues, care more about the narrative war than about actual military strategy. The official word out of DC and Tehran is the same: we're winning. But no military campaign in history has been won solely on the airwaves. Pack sees two sides that are doing their surreal best to ignore a war that they are both fighting. If you pretend it's not happening, then maybe it isn't. Don't mention the war. On this May Day, everyone is Basil Fawlty. Five Takeaways •       Two Sides with No Strategy: Both Trump and the Iranian regime are more invested in the narrative war — the story of who is winning — than in having an actual endgame. Trump says the blockade will make the Iranians cry uncle. The Iranians say they are surviving and therefore winning. Neither has clearly stated what they want from this conflict: not on the nuclear file, not on territory, not on regime change. Pack's verdict: he sees two sides that don't even know what they want to get out of a war they're both pretending is going well. •       No Campaign Has Ever Been Won Solely from the Air: The American military has showcased extraordinary AI-enabled tactical capability in the Iran conflict. But war is about outcomes and strategy. Territory must be controlled. New leaders must be installed. These things cannot be done from altitude. The Israeli Twelve-Day War hit the head of the snake — the Iranian regime — but may have overplayed its hand. A Shia axis that was being systematically degraded could come back like a phoenix if the narrative of martyrdom and resistance is allowed to reconsolidate around shared injury. •       Trump Does Projection: Pack's most pointed observation: track what Trump accuses his adversaries of, and you learn what he is about to do. He says the blockade will make the Iranians cry uncle. Which means he is on the verge of backing down. The absolute worst outcome, Pack argues, would be Trump as the one who folds — not because America loses a war, but because it loses the credibility that underwrites the entire international order. His fear: that is exactly what is about to happen. •       Pakistan: The Sleeping Giant: The story the world's media has mostly not told: Pakistan's role. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pakistan has a large Shia minority and a complex relationship with Iran. It also has a complex relationship with China, with the Gulf states, and with the United States. Any escalation that involves Iran necessarily involves the question of what Pakistan does. Pack considers this one of the most under-covered dimensions of the conflict and one of the most consequential. The sleeping giant has not yet been asked to choose sides. That moment may be coming. •       The First AI War: London Antisemitism and Russian Disinformation: Six antisemitic attacks in London in six weeks since the Iran war began. Pack's argument: the disinformation driving radicalisation on social media is not purely Iranian. Russia and North Korea are seeding the most outlandish conspiracy theories about Jewish people — great replacement, Epstein, the rest — and someone with mental health problems eventually acts. This, combined with AI-enabled targeteering and logistics in the actual conflict, makes this the first AI war. Future historians will untangle what that means. For now, it means the world is more disordered than it looks from any single headline. About the Guest Jason Pack is a Middle East analyst, host of the Disorder podcast, and a Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He is the author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder and a regular contributor to international media on North Africa, the Middle East, and great power competition. References: •       Disorder podcast by Jason Pack — disorder.fm. •       Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let's Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous — the Silicon Valley seminary argument, now tested in the first AI war. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:00) - Chapter 1 (00:31) - May Day check-in: is there even a war happening? (02:09) - Both sides care more about the narrative than strategy (02:37) - Trump's lack of endgame: no military campaign is won from the air (04:18) - How is the war covered in the Middle East? (06:09) - Shia vs Sunni: does it still matter? (07:54) - Hussein, martyrology, and the Shia willingness to fight the losing battle (09:21) - Syria and the Alawis: off the map? (11:00) - Pakistan: the sleeping giant (14:00) - Is this the equivalent of Suez? (18:00) - A new world order: does America want to lead it? (22:00) - The Gulf states and the new regional order (26:00) - Trump does projection: crying uncle (30:00) - China, Russia, and who benefits (34:22) - The first AI war: what will historians say? (37:25) - AI company stocks keep going up (38:02) - London antisemitism: six attacks in six weeks (40:12) - Russian and North Korean disinformation driving radicalization (42:13) - Disorder podcast: subscribe. The world needs it.  

Are you ready for a world where true personal computing is under threat? This week's candid conversation with Framework CEO Nirav Patel tackles why owning your own AI hardware matters more than ever—and what's at risk if we don't. Alphabet tops Q1 estimates on strong Google Cloud growth Is OpenAI Falling Further Behind in the A.I. Race? OpenAI Releases 'Spud' GPT-5.5 Model OpenAI Breaks Free From Exclusive AI Pact With Microsoft Google signs classified AI deal with the Pentagon for 'any lawful government purpose' Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared OpenAI Set to Redefine Smartphones; MediaTek, Qualcomm & Luxshare Key to Its AI Agent Phone Why Manus has become a crucial prize in the global AI race - Fast Company Australia unveils a 2.25% levy on Meta, Google, and TikTok The Man Behind AlphaGo Thinks AI Is Taking the Wrong Path Amateur armed with ChatGPT 'vibe-maths' a 60-year-old problem Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup's production database OpenAI Really Wants Codex to Shut Up About Goblins Now we know who paid $100,000 to unlock a Sam Altman podcast interview Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover, Like It or Not Generative AI vegetarianism To buy this Bay Area home, you'll need Anthropic equity | TechCrunch * Chloe vs. History Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public | TechCrunch noscroll Felvidek Amazon's AI product podcasts 64″D Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber Timmy's rescue Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Nirav Patel Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: scribe.how/machines outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security

Are you ready for a world where true personal computing is under threat? This week's candid conversation with Framework CEO Nirav Patel tackles why owning your own AI hardware matters more than ever—and what's at risk if we don't. Alphabet tops Q1 estimates on strong Google Cloud growth Is OpenAI Falling Further Behind in the A.I. Race? OpenAI Releases 'Spud' GPT-5.5 Model OpenAI Breaks Free From Exclusive AI Pact With Microsoft Google signs classified AI deal with the Pentagon for 'any lawful government purpose' Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared OpenAI Set to Redefine Smartphones; MediaTek, Qualcomm & Luxshare Key to Its AI Agent Phone Why Manus has become a crucial prize in the global AI race - Fast Company Australia unveils a 2.25% levy on Meta, Google, and TikTok The Man Behind AlphaGo Thinks AI Is Taking the Wrong Path Amateur armed with ChatGPT 'vibe-maths' a 60-year-old problem Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup's production database OpenAI Really Wants Codex to Shut Up About Goblins Now we know who paid $100,000 to unlock a Sam Altman podcast interview Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover, Like It or Not Generative AI vegetarianism To buy this Bay Area home, you'll need Anthropic equity | TechCrunch * Chloe vs. History Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public | TechCrunch noscroll Felvidek Amazon's AI product podcasts 64″D Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber Timmy's rescue Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Nirav Patel Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: scribe.how/machines outsystems.com/twit zscaler.com/security