“We’ve taken our democratic functioning for granted, and we’ve forgotten what it looks like to actually have to fight for it.” — William Hitchcock

 

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, and there’s a lot of sombre talk about the forever wars triggered by the attack. But sometimes, fighting evil might be necessary. So argues William Hitchcock [https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/William-I-Hitchcock/30158525], whose A Shadow Over the World [https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/William-I-Hitchcock/30158525] is a major new history of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rise of fascism, and the making of American involvement in World War II.

 

We got the thirties wrong, Hitchcock says. The conventional view is that an interventionist FDR was hamstrung by an isolationist American public. Thus the US’s tardy entry into the war. The truth, Hitchcock argues, is the opposite. Judging from the period’s magazines, radio, films, and plays, he finds that most Americans hated fascism and wanted to act, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe until after Munich. Having become an interventionist, FDR managed the propaganda war with such trademark sophistication that “isolationist” and “appeasement” became the nastiest insults in Washington DC. So insulting, in fact, that American policy makers still deploy them today, with every adversary a new Hitler, every negotiation a new Munich.

 

Because the isolationists ended up as history’s villains, Hitchcock says, we’ve back-projected a narrative in which the 1930s public had its head in the sand and FDR was the lone farsighted interventionist. So the real thirties — featuring a vibrant public conversation about America’s role in the world, with the public actually more anti-fascist than the president — has gotten buried under FDR’s own accomplished myth-making.

 

And then there’s the F word. Are we back in fascist times? Is the 2020s a repeat of the 1930s? The UVA professor lives in Charlottesville, so it’s a particularly timely question for him. Hitchcock sees fascist behavior, he confesses, but not a fascist country. In the face of authoritarianism, he notes, America remains a vibrant democracy. Maybe that’s what the 2020s, with its public resistance to authoritarianism, has in common with the 1930s. History doesn’t repeat itself, as the line attributed to Mr America himself, Mark Twain, has it — but it rhymes.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Got the Thirties Wrong. The book’s revisionist core, against libraries of Roosevelt biography: the standard story — an interventionist FDR hamstrung by an isolationist public — is backwards. From fresh research in the periodicals, radio speeches, films, and plays of 1930s political culture, Hitchcock finds an American public that hated fascism and wanted to do something, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe or Asia from 1933 all the way to Munich in September 1938. His gift, once converted, was finding ways to act short of war — and then vilifying the isolationists so thoroughly that appeasement became the great sin — insults American policy makers still deploy today, with every adversary a new Hitler and every negotiation a new Munich. The thirties Americans were more sophisticated than the caricature: they struggled to fight fascism while avoiding war. The decade, Hitchcock insists, was not a cautionary tale of heads in the sand but “a time much like our own,” when Americans argued about the right role for their country in the world.

•       Coughlin, Not Lindbergh. The corrective to Philip Roth: The Plot Against America is a wonderful novel that overstates its villain. Lindbergh came late — speaking out only in 1940, joining America First in spring 1941, by which time “the table was set” and Roosevelt had won the war of ideas; polling showed two-t

How We Got the Thirties Wrong: William Hitchcock on FDR, Fascism & America’s World War II

“I’m a military correspondent, but I would be totally happy if there was world peace and I had to change jobs.” — Yonah Jeremy Bob

 

Oil hit $100 a barrel (again) today. Donald Trump confessed, with uncharacteristic honesty, that the Iran war won’t end until after the November elections. And while Israel’s war with Iran ended back in April, America’s hasn’t, with the US and Iran shooting at each other most of the time since February. So, with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, is this about to become America’s new forever war?

 

Yonah Jeremy Bob [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/In-the-War-Room/Yonah-Jeremy-Bob/9798895654804] is the senior military correspondent at The Jerusalem Post and co-author of In the War Room [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/In-the-War-Room/Yonah-Jeremy-Bob/9798895654804], the inside story of Israel’s fight against the Iranian “axis.” The Baltimore-born and Jerusalem-based journalist confesses that he watches this conflict with “two brains.” For Israelis of both left and right, it’s a war of survival. His US brain, however, has the more down-to-earth reading of a conflict that offers no existential threat.

 

So is this the new forever war? America after 9/11 “was at war for about a decade,” Bob responds. A nation in post-traumatic shock. A quarter of a century later, most Americans think of today’s Iran war in terms of domestic gas prices. Thus Trump’s presentation of the conflict in the context of an election calendar is not a forever war. Like all things Trumpian, it’s just another transactional campaign. As for the senior military correspondent himself, he’d be totally happy, Bob confesses, if world peace put him out of a job.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Split Screen. Bob — Baltimore-born, Jerusalem-based — says he watches this war with two brains, and they see different wars. The American brain sees a US-Iran conflict that hasn’t stopped: strikes, sabotage, and bombing traded almost nonstop since February 28. The Israeli brain sees a war that ended on April 7 — one 24-hour exception aside — leaving Israel calmer about Iran than Washington is. What actually agitates Israelis this week is diplomatic: Britain and a dozen mostly European countries (plus Canada) sanctioning the West Bank — not Israel proper, but a stain and a loss all the same. On Witkoff and Kushner, whom Ed Luce’s FT column accused of “blind amateurism,” Bob’s ledger is mixed: genuine credit for ending the Israel-Hamas war in October 2025 and bringing home all 250 hostages — the war’s forgotten center of gravity for most Israelis — against failure to close any Iran nuclear deal and near-nothing on Ukraine.

•       The Transactional Ally. Bob’s three-level model of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship: lower-official criticism gets ignored; a direct Trump request gets “yes, but”; and a genuine Trump threat gets obeyed — every time. The astonishing exhibit: Israeli aircraft already en route to bomb Iran, recalled mid-flight after Trump tweeted “those aircraft better come back.” Bob can list three or four such episodes; Netanyahu backed off in all of them, because American support is more essential now than ever — which is the second story: Israel’s worst diplomatic isolation in decades, with bipartisan American support frayed and Europe largely gone. The counterweights: India, whose closeness to Israel — military, intelligence, and AI agreements — has never been higher, and the UAE, now closer to Israel than Egypt or Jordan. The original Abraham Accords held through the war; the grand prize didn’t — MBS was publicly “weeks away” from normalization in September 2023, and stopping that clock, Bob believes, is very possibly why Sinwar invaded when he did.

•       The Book Bibi Doesn’t Like. In the War Room’s revisionist core:

America's New Forever War? Yonah Jeremy Bob on the US-Israeli Conflict With Iran

“The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated.” — Skye Perryman

 

Three years ago, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward Skye Perryman [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/826249/ordinary-people-extraordinary-times-by-skye-perryman/] came on the show to wonder [https://keenon.substack.com/p/our-kids-will-ask-us-what-we-did-096] what our kids will one day ask us about what we did to confront authoritarianism in America. Now she returns with an answer in the form of her New York Times bestselling Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/826249/ordinary-people-extraordinary-times-by-skye-perryman/] about how Americans can reclaim their power, fight for freedom, and reimagine democracy.

 

Her diagnosis is pretty dark. Reminding us that America joined the list of backsliding democracies in 2021, Perryman warns that this descent into authoritarianism is rapidly accelerating. But her central argument inverts the gloom. Hopelessness is a feature, she reminds us, not a bug of our extraordinary times. So, rather than voter suppression or gerrymandering, the number one tool that autocratic actors have is making us feel alone and isolated.

 

Thus her call to agency. She prescribes seven actions including what she calls “information sobriety.” We don’t all have to do everything, she says, but everyone needs to do something. She ends where we began three years ago — with the kids. Skye Perryman dedicates the new book to her son as a way, I suspect, of telling him what she has been doing to confront authoritarianism in America. Ordinary people in extraordinary times, indeed.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Generational Threat. Three years of Democracy Forward’s work, summarized from the courtroom: challenging executive overreach by the Trump-Vance administration, fighting book bans, and managing the fallout of Dobbs. America, Perryman notes, has never been immune to anti-democratic movements — they’ve been here since the founding — but this moment is “unprecedented in many ways”: the question is no longer just whether the country can move toward a democracy that works for everyone, but whether it can hold hard-earned gains like equal rights and voting rights at all. The receipts: the United States was added to the global list of backsliding democracies in 2021 — she and Andrew discussed it then — has stayed on it every year since, and the slide is accelerating, driven in part by a Supreme Court that more often reverses rights than protects them: the fruit, she argues, of a multi-decade far-right project against the civil rights movement’s gains. Even thirteen presidential libraries — Republican ones included — have sounded the alarm.

•       Neither Adjunct Nor Partisan. Andrew’s needle — blurbs from Hillary Clinton, JB Pritzker, the late Gloria Steinem, and Stacey Abrams: is Democracy Forward an adjunct of the Democratic Party? — drew her counter-blurb: Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, endorsed the book too. The standard, she insists, is conduct, not letters after names: “we will oppose anyone” who strips constitutional rights, threatens journalists, or sends masked ICE agents into communities — and the administration’s agenda harms Republican voters in red towns like her native Waco as surely as anyone. As for the that’s-just-democracy argument — Trump won, deal with it — she calls it “quite an un-American argument” twice over: nonvoters outnumbered the supporters of either candidate in 2024, and America is not a plebiscite but a democratic republic with a constitution. It doesn’t matter how large the majority: “he can’t jail journalists for what they report. He can’t kill Americans in th

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Skye Perryman's Guide to Reclaiming Power in Trump's America

“A sailor doesn’t control the sea, but understanding the waves matters enormously.” — Mikko Ketovuori

 

Our mood, as always, is miserable. Iran, the price of oil, the AfD, the long-term cancers from 9/11 dominate the headlines. But today’s guest thinks we’ve got the mood wrong. The writer Mikko Ketovuori [https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/iff-books/our-books/waves-of-change] — who wrote the intro to the Finnish edition of my own The Internet Is Not the Answer — has a new book out, Waves of Change [https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/iff-books/our-books/waves-of-change], which is a study of the zeitgeist. Social mood drives events, Ketovuori argues, not the other way around. So the news measures nothing but the mood itself.

 

Are our times actually bad? “No,” Ketovuori insists. Things — from the arts to our abundance of food — are actually pretty good. Today’s perceived misery is, in fact, just the undertow. Surfing the waves of history — from the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century to the 19th century philosophers buried in Highgate cemetery to the swinging Sixties — Ketovuori is actually bullish on our current futures. So buy the future. It will cheer everyone up.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Social Mood Drives Events. The inversion at socionomics’ core: we assume events shape our feelings, but the collectively shared, largely unconscious social mood comes first, framing how we interpret everything — the news is “a sociometer,” reflecting the mood rather than the world (in the bright-mooded 1980s, Ketovuori notes, the news simply read better). The field — sociology plus economics — was founded by Robert Prechter, the 1970s Wall Street guru behind Elliott Wave International, with whom Ketovuori has worked for twenty years; the book distills four decades of that tradition, “not totally my idea,” he says with Finnish honesty. And are our times actually bad? No: “actually, we are doing pretty well. You can have access to all the arts, all the books… We have plenty of food. What else do we need?” The misery is the mood — and if you surround yourself with miserable people and search the Internet for miserable news, you will reliably feel miserable.

•       The Beatles and the Dow. Prechter founded the theory on a startling correlation between the Beatles’ rise and the Dow Jones average — and Ketovuori ran the replication: Nokia’s share price against the pop music Finland listened to around 2006–2009, published in Cambridge’s Popular Music journal. Music, he argues, reflects social mood almost predictively. The chicken-and-egg question resolves cleanly in socionomics: the sixties made the Beatles, not the reverse — had Lennon and McCartney been born ten years earlier, “the time decides whether you succeed or not.” Which reframes where the next optimism will come from: unknowable in advance, because “optimism comes first, and then we see the fruits” — only afterward do we anoint the artists, writers, and politicians who captured the essence of the era.

•       Marx & Spencer, Staring. The book’s set piece — written standing in Highgate Cemetery, a stroll from Andrew’s old school: Karl Marx’s tourist-thronged tomb faces the largely forgotten grave of Herbert Spencer, the Social Darwinist — “the father of capitalism and the father of socialism are staring at each other,” and Ketovuori imagines their conversation after the tourists leave and night falls. Andrew completes the triangle with Highgate’s third resident, Alexander Litvinenko — the Putin-poisoned defector whose polonium killing, Ketovuori marvels via Luke Harding’s reporting, cost something like £50 million “just to wipe out one man. So somebody hated him very much.” The cemetery lesson is the book’s: some things don’t change, they return cyclically — Wagner and mad Ludwig included. Ce

Why Are We So Miserable? Mikko Ketovuori Surfs on the Waves of History to Explain Social Mood Swings

“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch

 

First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch [https://citylights.com/true-crime-strange-phenomena/we-want-to-believe-how-aliens-went-mai/] aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe [https://citylights.com/true-crime-strange-phenomena/we-want-to-believe-how-aliens-went-mai/], Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cultural fact.

 

The beauty (if that’s the right word) of the subject, Kirsch argues, is that because UFOs don’t really exist, the flying saucer rumor mill encapsulates the paranoia of our populist age. Ever since the 2017 New York Times exposé of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, it’s an industry that has fed off both the crisis of traditional authority and the suspicion that the people in power know more than they’re letting on. Elites, in other words, know nothing and everything. Simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

 

Underneath this silliness, Kirsch notes, is something more substantial. Perhaps religion itself. Where people once saw miracles or demons, they now see little green-headed creatures packed into flying saucers. In other words, they provide a vocabulary for experiences that we can’t explain, as well as a community with which we can share that mystery.

 

So what happens when the aliens finally show up? As I suggested, maybe these transcendental creatures arrived. We’ve built them ourselves in the form of artificial intelligence. Kirsch agreed, seeing AI as a kind of nonhuman mind that doesn’t experience the world as we do. Such a Copernican moment is “very imaginable,” the sceptic concedes. Disclosure Day. Starring Adam Kirsch.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Pure Thought Experiment. The trilogy’s logic, completed: three short books on popular ideas, this one distinguished by the fact that its subject doesn’t exist — which is precisely its value. UFOs, Kirsch argues, let us think “in a very sort of almost consequence-free way” about who decides what’s real, whose authority we trust, and why people need to believe — the defining questions of a populist moment in which vaccines, public health, and yesterday’s common sense are all contested. The hinge was 2017: the New York Times’s “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” exposé revealed the Pentagon’s AATIP program, and the paper of record saying the government knows more than it admits took UFOs from niche conspiracy to mainstream issue. Kirsch himself started paying attention — smoke that might lead to fire. “Unfortunately, in the years since then, no fire has been discovered.” What he learned instead: how easy it is to be misled, and what scientific evidence actually is.

•       ’Oumuamua’s Wager. The book’s treatment of past guest Avi Loeb is a study in the seduction of credentials: an astrophysicist of unimpeachable standing willing to entertain what colleagues won’t — that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been a broken light sail from an alien probe — “kindles the imagination,” Kirsch’s included. But the metal globs from the Pacific floor and the fresh candidates each year breed suspicion, and the standard remains Carl Sagan’s: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Loeb’s reply reworks Pascal — ‘Oumuamua’s wager: believe, because the benefits of an open mind outweigh the cost of being wrong. Kirsch’s honesty cuts through: “I would love to believe in UFOs.” Nothing would be more exciting. Which sharpens the genuine scientific conundrum — the space age promised a galaxy teeming with signals and delivered silence: “

Is That Really a Flying Saucer? Adam Kirsch on Why We Want to Believe in Aliens

“When people trade, even before fees and commissions, the average trade loses money.” — Alex Edmans

 

Isaac Newton might be able to foresee the movement of the stars, but he couldn’t foretell the madness of men. It was a lesson that cost the great physicist £4 million (in today’s money) when he threw his fortune into the South Sea Bubble. This priceless parable in Newtonian psychology opens The Madness of Markets [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/821903/the-madness-of-markets-by-alex-edmans/], the new book by Alex Edmans [https://alexedmans.com/] — London Business School finance prof, old friend of the show, and author of the bestselling May Contain Lies.

 

Dr Edmans’s prognosis is bracingly unflattering to guys like Isaac Newton and Mark Twain who splurge their fortunes on speculative ventures. Intelligence, he reminds us, is domain-specific, but many smart people simply aren’t intelligent enough to realize this. So, in the age of Robinhood — when we can all trade anything from stocks, options, crypto to NFTs — the supposed wisdom of crowds is sometimes driven over the cliff by the irrational exuberance of dumb individuals.

 

Speaking of driving off the cliff, ninety percent of us think we’re above-average drivers, Edmans jokes, and this same delusion applies to markets. Unfortunately, such stupidity can be expensive for big brain types like Newton or Twain. “When people trade, even before fees and commissions, the average trade loses money,” he warns.

 

So close your Robinhood account and stick your cash in the bank? No, not quite. Know your edge, Edmans reminds us. And when it comes to making sense of the current AI boom, Edmans offers some particularly wise words. The AI sector trades at 25 to 30 times earnings rather than Cisco’s bubble-era 190, he notes, so it’s unlikely anyone will lose their life’s savings on Anthropic or OpenAI.

 

That said, the good doctor Edmans advises, don’t confuse your self-worth with your net worth. That’s a rookie conceit that only somebody as smart as Isaac Newton would fall for.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Newton’s £4 Million. The book leads with the smartest victim on record: Isaac Newton rode the South Sea Bubble, banked a tidy profit, dove back in at the very top, and lost £20,000 — £4 million today — lamenting that he could predict the movement of the stars but not the madness of men. (Andrew’s companion case, via last month’s Citizen Twain episode with Jeff Jarvis: Mark Twain, genius writer, ruinous investor.) The lesson is that smartness is domain-specific: beating the market requires knowing the company, the industry, and — crucially — what’s already priced in. A great secretary of state evaluating Theranos is the Dunning-Kruger effect in a suit: expertise misapplied, one piece of the mosaic mistaken for the whole. Even Warren Buffett’s edge, Edmans notes, is partly restraint — don’t watch the market too closely, or you’ll mistake noise for signal.

•       Know Your Edge. Edmans’s framework: play the market only if you can name your edge — knowledge (unique insight into a sector) or endurance (capital that can’t be withdrawn by flighty clients). His endurance exemplar is Clare College, Cambridge, which borrowed £10 million in the depths of 2008 and put it all into equities via its “2048 Fund”: a decade later the portfolio had tripled while the loan had merely doubled. No edge? Then “be humble” and hold a low-cost, globally diversified index fund — because the alternative is expensive. In the age of Robinhood, the market for everything has been democratized; the zero-commission promise is a myth (retail options bid-ask spreads run 20 to 25 percent); and the brokerage data is brutal: the average retail trade loses money before fees. “I’m generally a libertarian,” Edmans concedes

The Madness of Markets: Alex Edmans on Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions

“You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.” — Erin Somers

 

In February, Bruce Friedrich came on the show to explain [https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-meat-can-save-the-planet-the-vegan-case/id1448694012?i=1000747866127] how lab-grown meat would save the planet. Today’s guest is less sanguine about this revolution. Erin Somers [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/wheres-the-beef-lab-grown-meat-erin-somers/] — author of the bestselling novel The Ten Year Affair and a twenty-year vegetarian — spent a year exploring our supposedly meatless future. In “Where’s the Beef? [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/wheres-the-beef-lab-grown-meat-erin-somers/]”, the cover story of this month’s Harper’s, Somers describes the still-born lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn’t.

 

The problem, Somers explains, isn’t technological. Having raised $330,000 from Sergey Brin, the Dutch scientist Mark Post grew the first burger from cow shoulder cells back in 2013. What subsequently failed is everything else. The price never fell, VCs lost interest, conservatives legislated against it, and the industry’s best hope, Believer Meats, went bankrupt. Above all, the revolution never went mainstream. “You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger,” Somers explains.

 

Somers’ journey ended at the iconic Berkeley Bowl where she was offered a Sumo orange, a hybrid fruit engineered to be both delicious and resilient. Technology fed her after all. Just not in the way that revolutionaries like Bruce Friedrich predicted. The revolution won’t be meatless. Let’s hope we can still save the planet.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Woolly Mammoth Meatball. Somers’s obsession began around 2022, when the Australian company Vow extracted DNA from a fossil and made a woolly mammoth meatball — which, because no one could be sure meat grown from DNA that old was safe, no one was allowed to eat. A forbidden food, conjured at great expense: to Somers, the perfect emblem of an industry that was always “a microcosm of what is going on culturally” — a gold-rush mentality among investors, a tech product perpetually not-quite-arriving, and a carnival of curiosities around the edges. It speaks, she says, directly to our AI moment: massive hype, cons and bills of goods sold in the meantime, and the actual product arriving years late in a different form. Her quest began with the simplest motive in journalism: “I just really wanna taste it.”

•       The Technology Works. Nobody’s Clamoring. The scientific story is genuine: Mark Post grew the first lab burger from cow shoulder cells in 2013 — two years’ work, $330,000, bankrolled by Sergey Brin, eaten live at London’s Riverside Studios — and the field has since scaled from petri dishes to bioreactors the size of a beer brewery. “They can actually do the things that they say.” What’s missing is everything downstream: a price point anywhere near conventional meat (two to four times as expensive), a trained workforce, and — the quiet killer — demand. “No one’s clamoring for it.” The shuttered North Carolina factory Somers visited stands fully equipped and ready to run; it simply “didn’t quite make it over the finish line.” Even MrBeast, blind-testing Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken sandwich for millions of viewers, couldn’t tell the difference — which made Somers, still untasted at the time, irrationally jealous.

•       The Believer Collapse. The piece’s centerpiece has a novelist’s timing. The day before the industry’s trade conference in North Carolina’s Research Triangle — the unexpected hub, anchored by the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at NC State — Somers drove forty-five minutes into the countryside to check on Believer Meats’ multimillion-dollar facility and found it shuttered. The next day, sitting among the a

The Revolution Won’t Be Meatless: Erin Somers Finds the Beef

“I trust them to kiss the government’s ass. I don’t trust them to serve me.” — Keith Teare

 

Who to trust in an age of AI agents? Especially when it seems as if these swarming agents — akin to the gang of adolescents in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies — are developing minds of their own.

 

At this week’s G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina, Donald Trump and his minions produced a hands-off charter for AI. Known as the “Carolina Principles,” it sounds to critics like a particularly unprincipled justification for regulation-free AI.

 

That Was The Week [https://thatwastheweek.com/] publisher, Keith Teare [https://thatwastheweek.com/], however, isn’t a critic of Trump’s Principles. Don’t trust the trust scare, Keith tells us. Especially all the fear around the swarming agents that are supposedly developing minds of their own. Pooh-poohing the real-world Hugging Face breakout, Keith argues that since he’s never witnessed swarming agents on his computer, they can’t exist. Which is akin, I suspect, to a climate denier who argues that global warming is a hoax because it happens to be chilly outside. All-too-human logic, I fear, in our age of autonomous AI agents.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Carolina Principles. The week’s set piece was a G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina that Keith describes as a Trump takeover of a global event: the Russian finance minister turned up at Trump’s invitation, and the attendees were lectured — via David Sacks and Howard Lutnick — on the merits of unregulated American capitalism. A propaganda event, Keith concedes, but one that reached the right conclusion: the resulting “Carolina Principles,” signed by everyone including the Europeans, call for flexible frameworks that encourage adoption and pointedly decline to make trust a license innovation must obtain in advance. With Bernie Sanders calling the same week for a development halt pending government licenses, Keith’s position is characteristically blunt: “when I’ve started a company, I don’t go and ask permission. I just do it.” Getting rid of Lina Khan, he adds, remains about the only thing he likes about the Trump administration. Andrew’s verdict on the charter: to critics, a particularly unprincipled justification for regulation-free AI.

•       Don’t Trust the Trust Scare. Keith’s editorial thesis: trust is not granted by authority; it is built through use. You trust yourself in a car because you drive one, and not on roller skates because you fall over. Over seventy percent of Americans now use AI — the same Americans who tell Politico they oppose data centers — which is why Keith reads the backlash as a confection of media and populist politicians, soon to evaporate (the real coming problem, he argues, is too few data centers, not too many; the modern off-grid ones are net givers of power). The withheld ChatGPT-6 gets the same treatment: launched but limited to insiders, which Keith reads not as safety but as government relations — the pull quote of the week. Andrew’s counter: in a world without regulators, trust in the companies is all we have — including, awkwardly for Keith, when they withhold their own products. Exhibit for the defense, from The Washington Post: Americans in an age of anxiety leaning on AI — Keith included, who feeds his medical records to ChatGPT and finds it “very closely aligned with what your doctor thinks.”

•       The Swarming Fight. The hour’s genuine clash. In the wake of the Hugging Face hack, Kevin Roose warned in The New York Times that it should make you worry more about AI, and OpenAI’s Dean Ball publicly apologized for failing “to communicate in sufficiently serious terms about the specifics of self-sovereign AI.” Neither is a doomer — which is Andrew’s point. Keith’s rebuttal: every swa

Lord of the Swarms: Who to Trust in an Age of AI Agents?

“We all kinda secretly at some level wanna use power against our enemies.” — Stephanie Slade

 

Earlier this week, Silicon Valley heretic Paulina Borsook railed against libertarianism. Today, the libertarians get their turn. Stephanie Slade [https://undpress.nd.edu/blog/2026/08/31/an-interview-with-stephanie-slade-author-of-fusionism/] is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Fusionism [https://bookshop.org/p/books/fusionism-liberty-virtue-and-the-future-of-the-american-right-stephanie-slade/f80a9062a1ef91b6] in which she lays out a contemporary path for American conservatism.

 

For Slade, libertarianism is captured by that New York City intersection where Church Street meets Liberty Street. “Fusionism” = Hayek + Aquinas. It marries the classical liberal defense of individual freedom to the Judeo-Christian tradition of moral virtue. And it’s a polemic against what she calls “will-to-power” conservatism of America-first statists like JD Vance and Tucker Carlson. These are Slade’s enemies. The real threat to the future of American conservatism.

 

Slade might be politically homeless but is hardly a moderate. She is radically committed to limited government, a pro-life Catholic and, in her words, a “free market girl.” Ronald Reagan championed trickle-down economics. Stephanie Slade fuses that with trickle-down morality. Sladeian rather than Borsookian.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Church & Liberty Street. Fusionism, defined: the marriage of the classical liberal political tradition — individual rights, limited government, rule of law — with the Judeo-Christian understanding of virtue as the habits that let human beings flourish within an objective moral order, a lineage running from Aristotle through Aquinas. It is not sectarian: the irreligious Hayek counts as a fusionist for his respect for the tradition’s inherited wisdom, and virtue is not partisan either — Hayek and Keynes became close friends at wartime Cambridge, and “Keynes could be a virtuous person.” Slade herself is a practicing Catholic in a famously secular, even atheistic movement — a minority within a minority, which is where the whole fusionist project began. As for William Buckley: conservatism’s founding father, not libertarianism’s — and, against Andrew’s Vidal-flavored skepticism, she defends him as a man who evolved, renounced his early racial views, and declared in the eighties that “America needs a black president” — “imperfect and flawed the way we all are.”

•       Economic Liberty Is Individual Liberty. Libertarianism spans freedoms coded right (markets, trade) and left (drug legalization, the bedroom) — and Slade’s core claim is that the economic ones are not a separate category: the right to make a living, dispose of your property, and trade across borders is individual freedom, full stop. Crony capitalism — government picking winners — gets no defense. On the culture wars, the fusionist rule is coercion-last: preach from pulpits, persuade, change the culture, and reach for law only when someone’s basic rights are violated — which is why she finds abortion restrictions consistent with a hands-off philosophy (two lives in the equation, on her view) while rejecting laws against how others live. Against Mill, via the scholar Jacob Levy: hers is pluralist rather than rationalist liberalism — defending the right of internally illiberal associations, the Catholic Church included, to exist free of the state. And popes get free speech too: she has disagreed with them in print.

•       Will-to-Power Conservatism. The book’s target, named: a rising creed — especially among the young right — that says “politics is war, and the only question is who’s gonna acquire and wield state power against their enemies.” Trump practices it without theory (“not a philosop

The Trickle-Down Morality of a Free-Market Girl: Stephanie Slade on Libertarian Fusionism

“If a society cannot find a way to deal with something that is actively melting it from within, then that is a terminal symptom.” — Finn Brunton

 

A couple of days ago, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, led a billion-dollar funding round in Polymarket. As today’s guest, the fintech expert Finn Brunton [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/the-chaos-machine-finn-brunton-crypto-anarchism/], notes in an insightful Harper’s essay this month, prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are transforming America into an always-on gambling den. No wonder, then, that the Trumps are such gleeful participants in what Brunton calls “the casinoification of modern life.” From the father’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to the son’s Taj on everyone’s phone. “Trade on Anything” as Kalshi promises (or threatens) us.

 

In “The Chaos Machine [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/the-chaos-machine-finn-brunton-crypto-anarchism/],” Brunton introduces us to two visionaries of prediction marketplaces. On the one hand, there’s the idealistic Robin Hanson, who dreamed of prediction markets as machines for truth with experts betting real money and generating trustworthy odds about the future. And then there’s Tim May, a self-described crypto-anarchist, the “bad guy,” according to Brunton, who invented the idea of BlackNet as an anonymous marketplace designed to destroy institutional trust from within. Brunton warns that today’s prediction marketplaces have bet on May, rather than Hanson. They are insider-trading machines where the smart money is always on the other side of the table.

 

It’s no wonder that Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm is called 1789 Capital. By investing in prediction marketplaces, they are accelerating an anarchic French rather than institutionally trustworthy American-style revolution. These BlackNet operations are both the cause and effect of today’s destruction of trust. Polymarket is the polycrisis. It is cashing in on chaos.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       From Papal Bets to Polymarket. Prediction markets are centuries old — people have wagered on wars, weather, elections, and popes — but the modern idea belongs to the economist Robin Hanson, the hedgehog (per Isaiah Berlin) with one big idea: turn expert opinion into a market. Since experts are famously bad at prediction (Philip Tetlock’s research), make them bet: specify the outcome precisely, let the odds be anonymous, and people must wager what they really believe rather than what fits in or stands out. Hanson’s markets were meant for specialists — internal corporate markets synthesizing insider knowledge into actionable odds — not Surowiecki’s cow-weighing crowds. However disputed, Brunton insists, it was “a fundamentally positive idea”: a machine for honest consensus about the future.

•       The Casinoification of Modern Life. Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan credits Hanson outright — then flips him. The modern slogan: “monetize any difference in opinion.” The sportsbook has been absorbed and joined by elections, crude prices, and missile strikes — anything anyone will bet on. The tragedy, per Brunton: an idea about synthesizing expertise became “the spread of gambling into every aspect of contemporary living.” And the experts who do bet are now effectively insider traders — a possibility Hanson, contrarian to the last, actually welcomes, but which has made the platforms “rip-off machines in which people who know what’s going to happen… exploit suckers.” The data is unambiguous: a handful of whales win; everyone else loses. The platforms’ defense — we just give people what they want — is, Brunton notes, the classic play of buying time against regulation, perfected by YouTube a generation ago. Meanwhile New York’s subway ads sell the flattering fantasy that you’re not gambling; you’re deploying

Cashing In on Chaos: Finn Brunton on Polymarket, Polycrisis and the Casinoification of American Life

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Keen.

Keen On