Keen On America

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

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

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

(00:31) - The Churchill/Adams quote: liberal at 20, conservative at 40

(02:08) - Dahl’s Norwegian grandpa and the disputed attribution

(02:30) - Two kinds of troubling moral change: situational and historical

(03:10) - Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and his enslaved peopl...

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

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