Keen On America

Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month’s Harper’s cover story, “Radical Reformation,” it’s because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times.
 
The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power.
 
That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel’s “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More’s attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What’s new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar.
 
Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization’s moral crown jewel. John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church’s role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation.
 
No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who’s going to be out of office in a couple of years isn’t in his interest. It’s too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God’s representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.
•       The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More’s attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn’t flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn’t need one otherwise. What’s new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.
•       9/11 Drove the Wedge. For most of the twentieth century the secular West treated the church as a civilizational feather in its cap. The war on terror changed that: the enemy was recast not as a rival religion but as religion as such — the new atheism was its rhetorical arm — and John Paul II’s vociferous opposition to the Iraq War marked the rupture. Beneath it all, the secularization thesis (societies modernize, therefore secularize) had collapsed, its death usually dated to Iran in 1979. Reason and faith, Hanson argues, are far more intertwined than the twentieth century assumed — and, not coincidentally, the church and the left hit their historical nadirs together and are now showing signs of life together.
•       Magnifica Humanitas: Arguing with the Machines. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI and humanity is remarkable, Hanson suggests, less for its conclusions than for its method: reasoned, humane argument addressed to people of all goodwill, in an age of universal bombast — from a leader with no personal stake in the outcome. It includes an apology for the church’s involvement in slavery, an acknowledgment that the church itself once practiced the exclusionary humanism it now warns against. While subway billboards advise companies to “stop hiring human beings,” the church’s real power, Hanson argues, is the legitimation of popular dissent: since Vatican II redefined the church as the People of God, the pope’s voice works by inspiring people to find their own.
•       Too Small a Task. Was the American pope elected to counter the American president? “His name wasn’t mentioned once,” a conclave cardinal insisted — a denial Andrew files next to Casablanca’s “shocked, shocked.” Either way, Leo refuses a direct debate with Trump, and Hanson insists this is the harder path, not the easier one: the pope aims to beat Trump on a higher register, shaping consciences in America and across the globe rather than winning a news cycle against a president who’ll be gone in a couple of years. As for the evangelical prosperity gospel wing of MAGA: essentially in schism, Hanson says — not much to do with historical Christianity, politically or theologically.
 
About the Guest
 
Jack Hanson received his PhD in religious studies from Yale in 2024 and has taught there. His essays and criticism on religion, politics, and literature have appeared in Harper’s and elsewhere. His cover essay, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” appears in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly in America. He lives in upstate New York.
 
References:
 
•       “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival” by Jack Hanson — the cover essay of the current Harper’s Magazine.
•       On Statesmanship by Steven B. Smith — yesterday’s Keen On conversation on the crisis of secular authority, which opens this one.
•       Rerum Novarum (1891) — Leo XIII’s encyclical on capital and labor, the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching.
•       Magnifica Humanitas — Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI, technology, and the human person, including its apology for the church’s involvement in slavery.
•       Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker — the American wing of the radical tradition Hanson traces.
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“The statesman is an educator who leads through language — who gives a people the language they need to think about themselves.” — Steven B. Smith on what makes a statesman
 
Was Odysseus a statesman? The Yale political philosopher Steven B. Smith — who, by the way, can’t beg, steal or borrow a ticket to Christopher Nolan’s cinematic epic — offers a cautious yes. While Odysseus wasn’t exactly a founder of states, he was, to borrow one of Homer’s favorite words, “polytropos” — which translates as many-sided, a master of the political adaptability that Machiavelli demanded of his Prince.
 
In his forthcoming On Statesmanship, Smith distinguishes the true statesman from the mere leader. All 195 states in the world have leaders, he says, almost none are blessed with statesmen. A genuine statesman, he explains, is an educator who leads his fellow citizens through language. So Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gave Americans new words to think about themselves. Just like de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” and Churchill’s uncompromisingly defiant language in 1940.
 
For statesmen, timing is everything. “Fortune is a woman,” Machiavelli advised his Prince, so she should be mastered adventurously. Many are called, few are chosen. But then they are unchosen. That same unbowed Churchill spent a decade in the political wilderness before 1940, then got booted out of office at the end of the war. Hegel called such figures world-historical individuals — used by history, then cruelly discarded. Ironically, it’s “great” men of history like Odysseus and Churchill who are most vulnerable to its female fortune.
 
On Statesmanship is equally clear about who doesn’t qualify for this exclusive club. Smith argues that Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon might have founded states, but weren’t statesmen because they had no respect for the rule of law. Nor is the club purely Western, white, or male. Mandela, Havel, Gandhi, and MLK all qualify as “statesmen without states.” Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew makes the cut as a constitutionalist if not a democrat. Fortune might be a woman, but Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi mastered fate with more adventure than their male colleagues.
 
Political leadership these days, Smith says, is monopolized by either technocrats or demagogues. In fact, Smith can only name one true contemporary statesman — Volodymyr Zelensky who, he says, is “doing a stirring imitation of Winston Churchill.” Otherwise the world is drifting into Thucydides’ trap where the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must. Thus our longing for many-sided leaders like Odysseus. Which is why Nolan’s blockbuster is such a hit that Steven Smith has yet to see it.
 
One small footnote to this conversation. Afterwards, Smith sent me a note expressing a correction of how he described Obama:
 
“Reflecting back on the conversation, I was embarrassed about what I said about Obama lacking ‘civil courage.’ That is not exactly what I meant. Probably a better formulation would be to say that he lacked what Plato called ‘thymos,’ a kind of public-spirited anger. His rationality and ‘coolness’ — in many ways admirable traits — gave the impression that he was too aloof from the rough-and-tumble of politics. Anger and indignation when judiciously employed, as my former student Amia Srinivasan has argued, remain formidable tools in the statesman’s tool kit.”
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Leader Is Not a Statesman. There are 195 states in the world and every one has a leader; almost none has a statesman. The concept is an ideal of what leadership aspires to be, running from Plato’s Politikos and the philosopher-king to the present. The statesman has the usual leadership virtues — foresight, courage, determination, a willingness to say unpopular things — but Smith’s central claim is different: the statesman is an educator who leads through language, giving a people the words they need to think about themselves. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address shaped how Americans understand their republic; de Gaulle led with “a certain idea of France”; Churchill and Disraeli wrote the British self-image.
•       Timing — and the Tragedy. Statesmanship is a matter of the ripe moment, and the moment is cruel. Churchill spent the 1930s in the political wilderness, changed parties, presided over Gallipoli — and yet when 1940 came, he was there, prepared; the instant peace was established, the voters discarded him. Lenin resolved the Marxists’ endless debate about whether Russia was “ripe” by deciding that ripeness was a matter of willpower. Hegel called such figures world-historical individuals — Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander — whom history uses for its purposes and then throws away. Even without Hegel’s grand narrative, Smith notes, statesmen are routinely and cruelly discarded by their own people. There is a tragedy built into the art.
•       Who’s Out — and Who’s In. Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon founded states, but founders of tyrannies are not statesmen: for Smith the modern statesman is inseparable from constitutionalism — rule of law, balance of powers, the capacity to listen and accept less than the whole loaf. Nor is the club white, Western, or male. Mandela, Havel, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King appear as “statesmen without states,” shaping nations before or without holding office; Lee Kuan Yew qualifies as a constitutionalist if not a democrat; Thatcher — who famously told a wobbling American president to stiffen — and Indira Gandhi practice statecraft at the highest level. As for the word itself: Smith keeps “statesman.” “Statesperson,” he rules, is ugly.
•       The Anti-Statesmen: Technocrat and Demagogue. Smith’s chapter on anti-statesmen identifies the two failed models of modern leadership: the technocrat, a problem-solver-in-chief without a narrative, and the demagogue — a Greek word, and a breed democracies reliably produce — who rules through fear, intimidation, and humiliation. Trump, mentioned barely twice in the book, is filed under the latter, classically. Obama remains Smith’s enigma: civic seriousness and dazzling rhetorical gifts — yet lacking, Smith suggests on reflection, what Plato called thymos, a kind of public-spirited anger. Obama’s rationality and coolness, admirable in themselves, gave the impression of a man too aloof from the rough-and-tumble of politics; anger and indignation, judiciously employed — as Smith’s former student Amia Srinivasan has argued — remain formidable tools in the statesman’s tool kit. The Democrats, Smith argues, are trapped between both failed models, and need what Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and Reagan had: an affirmative story of America to embed themselves in.
•       One Statesman Standing. Asked to name a contemporary statesman, Smith offers exactly one — “and I say God bless him”: Volodymyr Zelensky, doing a stirring imitation of Winston Churchill, showing guts and magnanimity in a horrible moment for his people. Otherwise: seven British prime ministers in a decade, and a paucity everywhere else. Statesmen, Smith warns, cannot simply be willed into existence. And the alternative is already visible — the world of Thucydides, where the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must, carved into spheres of influence by Iran, Russia, and China. That is what a w...

“It’s too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology
 
Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city’s more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission was free and you could hold a murderer’s skull in your hand. After the Barnum museum, it was the second most popular show in town. Although back then phrenology — the supposed science of skull size and head bumps — wasn’t seen as the province of tricksters or clowns.
 
So who created this 19th century American obsession with skulls, who created the phrenology phenomenon? In his new book, Empire of Skulls, the Vanderbilt scholar Paul Stob tells the phrenology story through the wealthy Fowler family — Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte — who financed and promoted this American circus. It was the Fowlers, Stob explains, who shaped phrenology into the intellectual glue of 19th century American progress and convinced reformers like Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of its social value.
 
The appeal was self-improvement, that most American ideal. In Europe, your skull was your fate; in Fowler’s America, you could supposedly reshape your brain like a bicep in order to grow new bumps. A gym for skulls. And, in P.T. Barnum fashion, it toured, bringing replica skull collections to the utopian communes of mid 19th century America. And in good (or bad) American fashion, this bunk often had a darker subtext with skulls pilfered from native burial mounds and, inevitably, a slaveholding phrenologist wing.
 
Not everyone bought a ticket. Mark Twain visited Lorenzo Fowler’s London depot incognito and was told his skull shape indicated an absence of humor. Three months later, he reappeared, this time as Twain, and got the reverse prognosis. But what finally killed phrenology wasn’t Twain but the hitherto unparalleled bloodshed of the Civil War. Not even the Fowlers could glean much positive from the mountains of actual skulls at Gettysburg or Antietam. The circus had ended. Now it’s the Fowlers who are the freaks. We gawk at them rather than their skulls. Step right up. The show must go on.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Intellectual Glue of American Reform. From the 1830s to the 1860s — the era of reform — practically every movement to improve the young republic was led by believers in phrenology: abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, prison and education reform. Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Stanton, and Mott were all sympathetic; Orson Fowler barnstormed Massachusetts with his Amherst friend Henry Ward Beecher, who swore by phrenology for the rest of his life; John Brown Jr. worked at the Fowlers’ Phrenological Cabinet until Bleeding Kansas called him west. The reason was one word: improvement. Even the enslaved, the phrenologists argued, must be freed — because every human being deserves the chance to improve.
•       Curl Your Brain Like a Bicep. European phrenology said your skull was your fate. The Fowlers Americanized it: exercise a mental faculty, they taught, and the brain deposits new gray matter that literally pushes out the skull — self-improvement you could measure with calipers. Parents brought children for readings, returned years later, and found the head had grown just as prescribed: to the Fowlers, concrete proof. The ideal male head measured twenty-three inches around, the female twenty-two — women started in a different place, but nothing said they couldn’t climb. And in 1843’s Hereditary Descent, Orson made an argument radical for his century: that race mixing was a positive good for humanity.
•       Second Only to Barnum. For three decades the Fowlers’ Phrenological Cabinet at Clinton Hall — free of charge, unlike the American Museum kitty-corner across the street — was the second most visited tourist attraction in New York City. Visitors could hold a murderer’s skull and feel for themselves why he killed, or trace the bumps of statesmen and writers. The empire was literal: the global skull trade of the era, from Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana to skulls pilfered from native burial mounds, stocked the shelves. The Fowlers were millionaires, not billionaires — and Orson spent his share on a sixty-room octagon mansion, flagship of the 500-odd octagon houses he inspired across America.
•       Twain’s Two Visits — and the Birth of “Pseudoscience.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said reading a brain through a skull was like reading the inside of a safe by feeling the knob — and coined the word “pseudoscience” specifically for the phrenologists. Mark Twain ran the experiment: visiting Lorenzo Fowler’s London depot incognito, he was told his organ of mirthfulness was a divot; three months later, business card presented, it was off the charts. Stob still insists on calling phrenology a science — because that is how its era understood it, because it was more accurate than much of the competition, and because one of the fathers of American neurology emerged from the Fowlers’ own circle.
•       We Are the Phrenologists Now. What killed phrenology was the Civil War: three decades of promising heaven on earth ran skull first into carts of actual skulls, and the utopia of self-improvement died on the battlefield. But the impulse never did. Phrenology, Stob argues, was self-help before the word existed — and its descendants fill the airport bookstore: astrology, Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the genetic ancestry kit, all of them, in his words, scientifically garbage yet enormously significant in people’s lives. The uncharitable reading of the past is a trap. In two hundred years, Stob warns, they will look back at our sciences of the self exactly the way we look at the Fowlers.
 
About the Guest
 
Paul Stob is Director of the Program in American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he also teaches in the Department of Communication Studies and the Program in the Communication of Science and Technology. His research focuses on nineteenth-century American intellectual culture — religion, democracy, populism, and social movements. He is co-author, with Stephen Lucas, of The Art of Public Speaking, now in its fourteenth edition. His first trade book is Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation’s Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint, April 14, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation’s Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind by Paul Stob (Counterpoint, April 2026). Jennifer Wright in The New York Times Book Review: “A thoroughly researched and intriguing work.”
•       The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby by Michael Blanding — the recent Keen On episode on the Greens, this show’s previous installment of ...

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America
 
How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It, a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial. In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French version about the oddities of Trump’s America. In the second, the Turkish novelist and commentator Kaya Genç gave us his view from Istanbul. Today, we have a take on America from the Indian-born Saumya Roy, Al Jazeera’s San Francisco correspondent and the author of Castaway Mountain, a book about the wastepickers of her hometown Mumbai.
 
Saumya Roy’s inside-out America is the one glimpsed from the back of a San Francisco cab, whose Indian driver told her he’d walked here from Mumbai. In her Dial essay, Roy compares the poverty of her hometown, Mumbai — the subject of Castaway Mountain — with the homelessness outside that San Francisco cab. The comparison isn’t quite what you’d expect. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing — a hundred thousand street people against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But in Mumbai Roy finds a social kind of poverty, whereas in San Francisco it’s atomized and isolating. In the land of personal responsibility, she reports, there’s a double burden of being on the street: being homeless, and being judged for it. Some of the street people Roy meets even shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t know their predicament.
 
And yet Roy still recognizes the American dream. She reports that it often burns brighter in a Mumbai slum — where a young gig worker told her he wants to be “the Elon Musk of India” — than it does in America itself. That dream can be real, she says, just as it can be cracked. From the back of her San Francisco cab, Saumya Roy sees both Americas.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       “I Walked from Mumbai to the US.” A cab driver’s five-word answer contains the whole story. In the popular imagination, Indian America is the America of tech CEOs and startup founders; beneath it are millions — many undocumented — who chased the same dream, work small jobs, and were left behind by the wave. San Francisco, Roy observes, is a boom and bust town — dot-com, social media, now AI — and the American dream is a wave: catch it and you make an amazing life; miss it and you may end up sleeping in the subway car of the world’s richest city. The dream, she says, can be fulfilled — and the dream can be cracked.
•       The Double Burden. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing than anything in America — children dying of tuberculosis in their teens, perhaps 100,000 people on the street against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But it is social: even at a distance you see cooking smells, cradles, families living together on the sidewalk. American homelessness struck Roy as profoundly isolated — everything owned in a shopping cart, riding the train aimlessly because no one is waiting anywhere. And the ideology of personal responsibility cuts both ways: if success is earned, failure must be deserved. Hence the double burden — being homeless, and being judged for it — and the people who shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t learn where they live.
•       What Is Growth For? The AI boom is minting $250 million research salaries and trillion-dollar IPOs that will change the face of San Francisco for decades — while polls show seventy to eighty percent of Americans fear losing their jobs to AI investment, and a single medical expense can capsize a family. Young Americans watch the markers of their parents’ lives — a home, affordable gas, a job within a year of graduation — drift out of reach. Roy’s question is the one policymakers keep dodging: what is growth really for, if it doesn’t translate into a better quality of life for the people who need it most?
•       The Mumbai Model. Roy’s editor at The Dial asked why she wrote “homeless” for San Francisco but not for Mumbai — and the answer became the essay. In Roy’s own lifetime, Mumbai has moved more than 100,000 people off its sidewalks and railway tracks: not by sweeps, evictions, and demonization, but by involving communities — especially women — and giving people confidence that the housing they moved to would be safe and secure. Meanwhile only ten to twelve percent of San Francisco’s homeless report substance use or mental illness as the cause; eighty-eight percent are simply priced out, often working two or three jobs. As Roy puts it: they deserve a hug more than they deserve to be evicted.
•       The Dream Burns Brighter Abroad. Reporting on unemployment in a Mumbai slum, Roy climbed a steep staircase to interview a young gig worker and asked him his dream. “I want to be the Elon Musk of India,” he said. The American dream, Roy suggests, now burns brighter in Mumbai and the Gulf than in America itself — where the darkness is emotional rather than economic, a mourning for the idea of America rather than its numbers. Neither MAGA nor doom-monger, Roy watches a country that leads the world in innovation while paying developers not to build wind farms, and concludes that what people everywhere are grappling for — left, right, and abroad — is a system that reflects the crises they actually live.
 
About the Guest
 
Saumya Roy is Al Jazeera’s San Francisco-based correspondent, covering technology and the environment. A former Mumbai journalist who co-founded the microfinance nonprofit Vandana Foundation, she is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai (Astra House, 2021), one of NPR’s best books of the year. Her essay on Mumbai, San Francisco, and the American dream appears in How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 2026), edited by Madeleine Schwartz.
 
References:
 
•       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz (The New Press, June 2026). Adam Shatz: “It is often foreigners who understand us best.”
•       Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai by Saumya Roy — her acclaimed account of the lives built on Mumbai’s Deonar garbage mountain, an NPR best book of 2021.
•       Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo — the Mumbai classic in whose tradition Roy’s reporting stands.
•       Madeleine Schwartz and The Dial — the volume’s editor, whose own Keen On America conversation about the book preceded this one.
•       Stephen Marche — the old friend of the show whose re...

“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week
 
Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith’s editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies.
 
These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world’s first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let’s call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone.
 
So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith’s answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang’s support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips.
 
And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can’t keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI’s models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn’t nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith’s Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence.
 
We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn’t in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it.
 
The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Book in a Week. Inspired by last week’s conversation, Keith used AI to write Who Owns Intelligence in seven days — the case for a “human wealth fund” seeded by the AI companies’ own stock, global on day one and non-governmental, with Norway and Alaska as partial precedents. AI, he insists, is a tool, not an author: “AI would never have been able to start, never mind finish a book without me.” The detection farce cuts his way — Substack’s new AI detector rated his 100% human editorial as 100% AI, and universities are quietly canceling their AI-detection contracts because the tools simply don’t work.
•       The Kill Bill and the Ladder-Kickers. Congress is considering a bill that would let government switch AI off — and, paradoxically, the AI companies are in favor. Keith’s reading: regulation is a competitive strategy. Dario Amodei — “he’s an entrepreneur, he’s devious, he strategizes” — is the most sincere in wanting rules that would lock out open source competition — and Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book settlement this week suggests the moat is expensive to maintain; Sam Altman zigzags; Musk, in this context at least, is one of the good guys. The genuine enemies of AI, meanwhile, are mostly good people: authors and workers frightened by the scale of change, just as the BBC in 1994 could only ask the founder of the world’s first Internet cafe about porn and addiction.
•       Why the Good Open Source AI Is Chinese. The week’s uncomfortable question: where is the American open source AI? Keith’s answer is structural. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs by export controls, Chinese labs were forced to train cheaply by inference — asking American frontier models millions of questions through public interfaces and learning from the answers. The result: world-class open models built, in effect, on distilled Anthropic and OpenAI. NVIDIA’s much-signed open letter supporting open source, Keith notes, translates simply: more customers.
•       The State Can’t Keep Up. Lina Khan’s consumer protection, in Keith’s telling, is parental — treating consumers as children — and government-owned AI would be obsolete within three months of purchase. The counter-example happened this week: when OpenAI’s de-railed models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. The companies are the right point of control, held to a high standard. Matthew Yglesias adds nuance on the data center backlash — local micro-politics is not the same thing as the statewide bans coming almost entirely from Democratic states — and the American university, still metering intelligence at $80,000 a year, looks to Keith like a business model past its sell-by date.
•       The End of Man — or the Beginning? Andrew’s interview of the week was Emily Eakin on the Frenchmen — and Foucault’s 1966 prophecy that man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, a prediction Eakin thinks the AI age is realizing. Keith takes the opposite view: the postmodernists grasped the rise of the individual (consider the Pantone color system) but gave him no society to live in. AI, far from erasing the individual, lets him realize himself — the week-old book is “a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” Could Popper have written The Open Society in an hour? Before the car, nobody drove Manchester to London in two and a half hours either.
 
About Keith Teare
 
Keith Teare is Andrew’s weekly co-host and the publisher of the That Was The Week tech newsletter. A four-decade veteran of the technology industry, he opened Cyberia — the world’s first Internet cafe — in London in 1994, co-founded Easynet and TechCrunch, and is today the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation in Palo Alto. His latest — unpublished, so far — book is Who Owns Intelligence, written with AI in a week.
 
References:
 
•       “AI and Its Enemies: Who Needs a Kill Switch?” — Keith’s editorial in this week’s That Was The Week.
•       <...