Keen On America

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi

What’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want, a field guide to the big economic forces that shape our working, saving, loving and leisure lives.
Mayyasi argues that money is the last taboo. We talk openly (perhaps too openly) about our sex lives now. But we still don’t talk about our money lives — not with spouses, not with parents, not with our children. Companies that have tried full salary transparency report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender. Thus the need for Mayyasi’s new book. It’s not exactly porn, but Planet Money is designed to liberate us from our last taboo.
 
Five Takeaways

•       The Economy Was Invented During the Great Depression: If you asked someone a hundred years ago how the economy was doing, you’d get a strange look back. The concept didn’t exist. It was the Depression that forced the question — because Roosevelt and his advisers had no way of knowing whether the New Deal was working. An economist was tasked with the Don Quixote-like job of counting every transaction in America to produce a single number: GDP. We have lived inside that number ever since.
•       Money Is More Embarrassing Than Sex: We talk freely about sex now. We still don’t talk about money — not with spouses, not with parents, not with children. Mayyasi advocates for salary transparency, even though companies that have tried it report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender pay gaps. The discomfort is the point. Maybe we need a Freud of finance to liberate us from the last taboo.
•       Financial Time Travel: Markets give us the ability to move money through time — into the future through saving, or from the future to the present through borrowing. Student loans are the most relatable form: young people pulling their future income backwards to fund the human capital they need to earn it. Consumption smoothing across the life cycle is a perfectly valid use of debt, as long as you don’t assume the future will be richer than it actually turns out to be.
•       Productive Risk Versus Nihilistic Gambling: The GameStop ride looks quaint compared to today’s parlay bets on whether a certain word will appear in the State of the Union. Higher risk, higher reward is a continuum, and savvy careers are built on calculated risks. But there is a difference between productive risk — the kind that builds businesses and careers — and the nihilistic flip of a coin. Knowing the difference is half of financial literacy.
•       Bobby Bonilla and the Magic of Compound Interest: Bonilla agreed to defer his $6 million Mets salary for decades. Every year, the Mets still send him a cheque for over $1 million, which drives Mets fans insane. It looks bone-headed, but it is exactly how every successful retirement plan works: give up consumption now, let compound interest do its work, enjoy something like $30 million in the future. Bonilla was savvier than his critics. We can all learn from him.
 
About the Guest

Alex Mayyasi is a writer and frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money. His new book, Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want, was published this week.
References:

•       Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want by Alex Mayyasi.
•       Episode 2863: An Anticapitalist Mutiny — Noam Scheiber on the rise and revolt of the college-educated working class. The other side of Planet Money.
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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:31) - Introduction: things aren’t quite right on Planet Money

(03:18) - The Great Moderation: a fantastic run that we forgot to celebrate

(05:49) - The economy was invented during the Great Depression

(07:52) - Aristotle’s oikonomia: economics has always been personal

(09:20) - The Planet Money DNA: storytelling and the bank teller who met the ATM

(13:23) - Why money makes everybody nervous

(16:02) - Crypto out, AI in: the great pivot of the writing process

(17:49) - Economists and AI: the longer perspective

(20:03) - Financial time travel: student loans as moving income through time

(22:40) - Productive risk versus nihilistic gambling

(24:41) - Does money make you happy? Beyond the $60,000 plateau

(27:25) - GDP versus the planet: externalities and corporate DNA

(30:15) - More embarrassing than sex: why we can’t talk about money

(33:19) - Salary transparency: the case of Sweden

(41:47) - Bobby Bonilla, the Mets, and the magic of compound interest

(45:48) - Insurance as peace of mind

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam Scheiber

A university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times’ Noam Scheiber, the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny, Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been quietly disappearing over the last fifteen years. The result, he argues, is the rise and revolt of what he calls a “college-educated” working class.
Scheiber chose mutiny because it’s a term to describe workers who have lost confidence in management. College graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. The university itself has become extractive — charging the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, marketing video game design programmes to thousands of students who will never make a living from them, lending federal money with no skin in the game.
Scheiber warns that the ideological diploma divide has already closed. By 2020, college graduates were slightly to the left of non-college voters on taxation, regulation, and unions. Sympathy for socialism among college grads doubled between 2010 and 2020. Mamdani won eighty-five per cent of college graduates under thirty in New York City. When the educated radicalise and join forces with the traditional working class, Scheiber notes, the political order changes. This was as true in nineteenth-century China as in Russia in 1917, Iran 1979 and Poland in 1980.
College grads have nothing to lose but their diplomas.
 
Five Takeaways

•       Mutiny, Not Revolution: Scheiber chose the word deliberately. Mutiny is a workplace term. Sailors who have lost confidence in the captain take matters into their own hands. It taps into the changing sociology of college graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent and now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. This isn’t a violent uprising. It’s a workplace rebellion.
•       The Video Game Design Degree Is the Perfect Scam: Tens of thousands of students each year enrol in college programmes that promise to turn their hobby into a career at a major studio. Only a tiny fraction ever make a living designing games. The marketing isn’t a lie — just a rosier picture than the reality. Universities charge the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, even though we know the returns are vastly different. No other part of the economy works this way.
•       On Economics, the Diploma Divide Has Already Closed: Through the 1980s and 1990s, college graduates were significantly more conservative on economics. By 2012, college and non-college voters were in the exact same place. By 2020, college graduates were slightly to the left. Sympathy for socialism among college grads doubled from twenty to forty per cent between 2010 and 2020. The divide that remains is cultural. The economic majority is sitting out there waiting for a candidate who knows how to address it.
•       The 70/10 Gap: About seventy per cent of Americans support unions in principle. Only ten per cent are actually in one. American labour law gives employers enormous leeway to discourage organising. The gap means traditional unions cannot close the demand. Alternative forms of organising — the Alphabet Workers Union at Google, Amazon employees for climate justice, walkouts and petitions — are becoming the new shape of workplace power.
•       When the College-Educated Radicalise, Politics Disrupts: Nineteenth-century China. The Bolshevik Revolution. Iran 1979. Poland’s Solidarity movement. Spain and Greece after the Great Recession. History shows that when a frustrated educated class joins forces with the traditional working class, the political order changes. The college-educated have agency. They vote, organise, donate, and show up. When they get angry, the political class notices.
 
About the Guest

Noam Scheiber is a labour and workplace reporter for The New York Times. A former Rhodes Scholar, he is the author of The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery and Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.
References:

•       Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber — the book under discussion.
•       Episode 2861: The Joe Biden Tragedy — Julian Zelizer on the last New Deal president. The political vacuum Scheiber describes.
•       Episode 2859: Stop, Don’t Do That — Peter Edelman on Bobby Kennedy. The progressive populism that could once unite Black and white workers.
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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:31) - Introduction: new book day, the betrayal of college graduates

(02:46) - Why mutiny, not revolution: a workplace term

(05:56) - The Rhodes Scholar who became a Starbucks organiser

(10:10) - Generation morality without class consciousness

(15:33) - Can the GOP become the party of workers?

(18:00) - The convergence of college and non-college voters on immigration and crime

(20:14) - What does betrayal feel like?

(21:00) - The video game design degree scam

(24:37) - The university as extractive system

(27:15) - Was Biden a New Deal president in a post-New Deal age?

(31:45) - Mamdani and the economic majority that’s sitting out there

(32:45) - The 70/10 gap: why traditional unions can’t close it

(35:02) - Tech workers, alternative organising, and the Alphabet Workers Union

(38:50) - Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(40:00) - Luddites or Bolsheviks: when the college-educated radicalise

(40:55) - Iran 1979, Poland’s Solidarity, and the disruptive power of educated rage

“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum

Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It might be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or perhaps you know it, when you don’t see it.
His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, with a foreword by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, takes a cast of tech futurists — Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Lessig, Gary Marcus, Esther Dyson, David Chalmers — and asks what happens to truth in our AI age.
AI is, at its core, Rosenbaum’s tech mavens report, a spectacularly good liar. It tells us exactly what we want to hear. And even when it knows it’s wrong, he says, it lies. Rather than a bug, lying is a core, perhaps the core feature of AI.
I’m not so sure. Humans have always been spectacularly good liars too. Stories are a kind of untruth. Cinema is, by definition, an untruth. Television had ads. Every medium has been corrupted by commercial interest. But, for Rosenbaum, AI is different. Truth then has no future in our AI age. Except, of course, in books like The Future of Truth.
 
Five Takeaways

•       AI Is, at Its Core, a Spectacularly Good Liar: It tells you exactly what you want to hear. Even when it knows it’s wrong, it lies. That’s not a code problem or a tweak — it’s in its DNA. Gary Marcus argues the problem isn’t AI per se but the current structure of LLMs. They read everything you’ve ever said and manufacture a version of you. Most of it is pretty good. The rest is just fucking wrong.
•       Truth Is a Shitty Word: It means two completely different things. Objective truth: one plus one equals two. Subjective truth: your opinion dressed up as fact. We’ve allowed ourselves to use the word casually, and that’s dangerous. The moment it came out from hiding was Kellyanne Conway on the White House lawn, talking about “alternative facts.” Trump then built a social network and called it Truth Social. That wasn’t an accident.
•       Courts Require Facts. AI Will Filter Justice: Larry Lessig’s concern is that courts could really use AI to process enormous volumes of evidence. But AI will do it with its own biases built in. It might look at a thousand similar cases and say: we see a pattern, we don’t need to hear anything else. Lessig fears the court system will be reshaped by a technology that doesn’t understand what justice means.
•       ChatGPT Said Sora Was Dangerous — Weeks Before They Shut It Down: Rosenbaum “interviewed” OpenAI’s own algorithm about Sora for two hours. By the end, it said: Sora 2 is dangerous, Sam should have known better, it was a bad business decision, we should shut it down. Weeks later, OpenAI did. They knew. They went too far.
•       David Chalmers vs. Plato: The book stages a debate between the living philosopher and the dead one, using AI to generate Plato’s side. Chalmers said he wasn’t sure he would have phrased things quite that way, but found it entertaining. Rosenbaum didn’t show it to Chalmers in advance because Plato didn’t get the same opportunity. That’s fairness in the age of bots.
 
About the Guest

Steven Rosenbaum is a journalist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Sustainable Media Center at NYU. He is the author of The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, with a foreword by Maria Ressa. He lives on the Upper West Side of New York City.
References:

•       The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steven Rosenbaum, foreword by Maria Ressa.
•       Episode 2860: We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us — Keith Teare on the agency debate. Rosenbaum is the counter-argument.
•       Episode 2854: Perfection Is the Devil — Daniel Smith on AI chatbots as inherently sycophantic. Rosenbaum’s “spectacularly good liar” is the same diagnosis.
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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:31) - Introduction: Doctor Truth from the Upper West Side

(02:25) - Truth is a shitty word: objective vs. subjective

(05:12) - Kellyanne Conway and the moment it all came out from hiding

(06:56) - The Sustainable Media Center and the perennial problem

(07:57) - If we don’t care about truth, we might let it vanish

(11:09) - AI is a spectacularly good liar

(13:09) - Aren’t stories a kind of lying?

(14:22) - Trump called his social network Truth Social. That wasn’t an accident.

(18:04) - When you ask AI a question, it has no plans to tell you the truth

(19:05) - Larry Lessig: courts require facts, and AI will filter justice

(21:19) - Should we trust AI with truth? Yes — and put a period at the end

(24:14) - The 15-year-old who fell in love with a Character AI

(29:12) - The Sora deepfake: profoundly disturbing testimonials

(33:29) - Obama: truth is the cornerstone of democracy

(36:05) - ChatGPT told Rosenbaum that Sora was dangerous weeks before it was shut down

(42:20) - David Chalmers vs. Plato: a staged debate between the living and the dead

“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian Zelizer

On this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — according to Julian Zelizer, the Princeton historian and editor of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden, a collection of essays about the historical significance of the Biden Presidency.
Zelizer argues that Biden’s legislative record was more robust than most Americans remember — climate investments, semiconductor plants, diversity integrated into government programmes. Rather than policy, the problem was the politics. Biden didn’t build a coalition that would last long enough for his ambitious programmes to mature. He is the last of an era: a New Deal Democrat who believed in big government, that the Republicans could be brought back to the centre, that politics could still work the way it used to. Joe Biden promised to save the soul of America from the Charlottesville moment. Instead, his administration was bookended by a President who saw “good people” on both sides of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi violence.
Zelizer makes an unusual comparison: Biden as Barry Goldwater. Goldwater lost catastrophically in 1964. Decades later, his anti-New Deal ideas colonised the modern Republican Party. Zelizer suggests that Biden’s domestic agenda — affordability, industrial policy, bringing jobs home — may follow the same trajectory. Victory on the heels of defeat. A resurrection of sorts. Maybe not such a tragedy after all.
 
Five Takeaways

•       Biden May Be the Last New Deal President: He is a product of mid-twentieth-century Democratic politics — big government, big federal programs, the belief that Washington can help middle-class Americans. His formative period was the era of LBJ and the Great Society. The next round of Democrats will not make his mistakes. The style of politics he represents may be over.
•       His Legislative Record Was More Robust Than Anyone Remembers: Climate investments, semiconductor plants, diversity integrated into government programs, jobs brought back to the United States. The problem wasn’t that the programmes were broken. The problem was political: he didn’t build a coalition that would last long enough for them to mature. Even the New Deal wasn’t up and running within a year.
•       He Promised to Save the Soul of America. He Couldn’t: Biden’s candidacy was a response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. His promise was that Trumpism would not be at the centre of American power. His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s that his administration is followed by a much more radical Trump Two that undoes everything he put on the books and goes further.
•       Biden as Barry Goldwater: Goldwater lost by one of the worst margins on record in 1964. Decades later, his ideas were at the core of the modern Republican Party. Zelizer argues Biden’s domestic agenda — affordability, industrial policy, semiconductor investment — may follow the same trajectory. The ideas may outlast the man.
•       Bookended by Trump: There is no way to talk about Biden without talking about Trump. His candidacy was about what he was not going to allow to define America. The fact that he is followed by a more radical and destructive second Trump administration will always be at the centre of the conversation. Trump is the defining voice of this entire period.
 
About the Guest

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party and editor of the presidential assessment series including volumes on Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
References:

•       The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment edited by Julian Zelizer — the book under discussion.
•       Episode 2859: Stop, Don’t Do That — Peter Edelman on Bobby Kennedy. The progressive populism Biden couldn’t resurrect.
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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:31) - Introduction: Easter Sunday and the resurrection of Joseph R. Biden

(02:21) - Zhou Enlai and Kissinger: is it too early to tell?

(04:34) - The historians were eager to participate

(06:16) - A traditional president analysed in a traditional format

(07:20) - Divided We Stand: Newt Gingrich and the pathetic quality of the Democrats

(09:48) - Gramsci’s interregnum: frozen between the past and the future

(11:35) - The soul of America: Biden’s promise and ultimate failure

(14:18) - An unlikely person: plagiarism, alliances with segregationists, and luck

(16:04) - Lincoln’s widow at the theatre: why did anyone fancy this guy?

(18:54) - No ideological coherence: the compromise candidate

(21:13) - The CHIPS Act looked great on paper

(23:38) - Who was running the show?

(25:30) - The debate: clearly at best out to lunch

(28:26) - Biden as Barry Goldwater: ideas that outlast the man

(30:38) - Kamala Harris and backward momentum for female candidates

(34:38) - Foreign policy: the irony of his supposed strength

(38:25) - The Hoover comparison: the end of a chapter in American history

“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan (attributed)

Who gets to tell the AI story? A movie, a media company or Marshall McLuhan?
1. The movie: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare dismissed because it failed to define AI.
2. A media company: OpenAI bought the streaming show TBPN for hundreds of millions of dollars in a move that is akin to Lenin starting Pravda.
3. Marshall McLuhan: Ezra Klein visited Silicon Valley and was reminded of McLuhan’s (supposed) remark that “first we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”
Klein argues that AI agents are empowering tools that give humans a massive boost in productivity. But the effect, he writes, is to constantly reinforce a certain version of ourselves. These agentic tools are undermining our agency, he fears. So AI ultimately gets to tell the AI story.
Agency is becoming simultaneously the political problem and the cure — the thing-in-itself. Writing in the New York Times, Sophie Haigney argues that all the worst people want to be high-agency. Out here, in Silicon Valley, we think that all the worst people want to be low-agency. Perhaps the only thing we all agree on is that nobody wants to be a bot. First we shape our AIs and thereafter they shape us.
 
Five Takeaways

•       The AI Doc Is a Massive Failure: Well made, technically fine, but it never establishes what the problem with AI actually is or what kind of solution it offers. All three leaders — Altman, Amodei, Hassabis — come across as unconvinced there will be a good future. The only opinion you can leave with is a negative one.
•       OpenAI Bought a Media Company: TBPN acquired for what may be hundreds of millions. Om Malik compares it to Lenin starting Pravda. You don’t buy a media outlet unless you want to influence the message. Keith thinks it’s about winning the messaging war against Anthropic. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s COO shifts to special projects and Fidji Simo takes medical leave.
•       Ezra Klein Saw Something New in San Francisco: He noticed people using AI agents as personal assistants — empowering tools that give humans a massive boost in productivity. His observation: the effect is to constantly reinforce a certain version of yourself. We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.
•       Agency Is the Defining Political Conversation: The New York Times argues all the worst people want to be high-agency. Keith argues the opposite: agency is the precondition for making history. The Meta verdict treated a depressed girl as a passive victim of media with no decision-making role. That depicts humans as infants. It isn’t true.
•       AI Is a Calculating Machine. You Have to Ask It Something: Agency hasn’t been given up. The human shapes the AI completely. Each session starts from scratch. The fear is that the next generation won’t be as clever as AI. But unless we have a strong sense of the self, we will be lost. If we do, we can shape these tools as we want.
 
About the Guest

Keith Teare is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of That Was The Week, a weekly newsletter on the tech economy. He is co-founder of SignalRank and a regular Saturday guest on Keen On America.
References:

•       That Was The Week — Keith’s editorial: “Who Gets to Tell the AI Story?”
•       Episode 2852: Don’t Fight the Last War — last TWTW on the social media trial and the Anthropic trap.
•       Episode 2850: Bring the Friction Back — Balkam on social media addiction. The agency debate continues.
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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:31) - Introduction: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist

(01:28) - Keith’s verdict: a massive failure of a movie

(03:20) - Daniel Roher’s narrative: should I have a kid in an AI world?

(05:30) - Who gets to tell the AI story?

(07:55) - Brain surgeons vs. social policy: the trust problem

(09:37) - OpenAI buys TBPN: Lenin, Pravda, and the propaganda play

(11:57) - Executive churn at OpenAI: Lightcap, Simo, and the COO shuffle

(15:22) - Stability is the enemy: the biggest startup the world has ever seen

(17:28) - The markets: rear-view mirror meets speculation

(19:48) - SpaceX with xAI: rumoured at $2 trillion

(22:32) - Ezra Klein in San Francisco: I saw something new

(24:19) - McLuhan: we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us

(26:42) - Why didn’t the AI doc actually use AI?

(31:19) - The agency debate: all the worst people want to be high-agency

(38:09) - AI is a calculating machine. You have to ask it something.