Keen On America

“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed

Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it’s the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.
Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.
How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire’s answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn’t fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.
And then there’s the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.
McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn’t preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That’s the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.
Five Takeaways

•       It’s the Gun Itself. Every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, mental illness, and toxic social media. What none of them has, McIntire argues, is a repetitive, constant problem of schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers being massacred. Up to forty thousand Americans a year die from guns — half of them suicides — and firearms account for three-quarters or more of all homicides. Yet America treats these uniquely dangerous things as ordinary consumer goods, bought, sold, marketed, and carried around like an iPhone or a wallet. Whatever role Hollywood plays — and McIntire takes David Thomson’s argument seriously — you have to start with the one thing that is actually different: the gun.
•       A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. When a plane crash kills two hundred people, there is a massive media and government response. When two hundred people die in scattered shootings across fifty states in the same period, there is a local news story, and then nothing. Gun violence in America has slipped into the category of acceptable losses — background noise. The conundrum for gun-safety advocates is how to sustain attention on a crisis that only becomes visible when the next Sandy Hook or Parkland arrives.
•       No Duty to Retreat. English common law, imported into the colonies, required you to retreat from a public confrontation before resorting to lethal force. Amid the centennial fervor of 1876, American courts began overturning homicide convictions on new grounds: retreat, declared Indiana’s Supreme Court, was not “the tendency of the American mind,” and a “true man,” added an Ohio court, need not fly from an aggressor. The repeating rifle helped make the old duty obsolete — you cannot outrun a bullet — and stand your ground became canon. Every week, somewhere in America, the defense still succeeds.
•       “The Biggest Fraud”: Rewriting the Second Amendment. The founders’ great fear was a standing army; the amendment preserved a well regulated militia — trained and disciplined, not unlimited. Beginning in the 1970s, the NRA underwrote sympathetic scholarship, law reviews, and court cases in a deliberate long game to recast the amendment as an individual right — moving guns from common law, where legislatures can regulate, into constitutional law, where they largely cannot. Warren Burger, the Republican former chief justice, called it the biggest fraud he had ever seen perpetrated on the American people. Now the Supreme Court’s “common use” test — found nowhere in the Constitution — means a weapon popular enough may be unbannable, with AR-15 bans next on the docket.
•       The Death Star Eclipsed. McIntire’s cache of internal NRA documents traces the organization’s path from post-Civil War marksmanship club — cofounded by a former New York Times correspondent — to radicalized lobbying juggernaut, complete with pro-gun Democrats like John Dingell on its board. Today it has been outflanked by no-compromise groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition, which at any given moment is pushing more lawsuits against state gun laws than the NRA. Guns remain the third rail — Beto O’Rourke said “hell yes” to taking away AR-15s and has not held office since. The irony in McIntire’s prescription: gun-safety advocates should copy the NRA’s own generation-long legal strategy.
About the Guest

Mike McIntire is an investigative journalist at The New York Times and a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting teams, whose work has exposed everything from Russian election interference to the hidden financial incentives of policing. He is the author of Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His new book is Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence (One Signal/Atria, July 2026).
References:

•       Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence by Mike McIntire (One Signal/Atria, July 2026). Jane Mayer: “McIntire is both a superb reporter and storyteller.”
•       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson — the recent Keen On guest whose argument about Hollywood and American violence opens the conversation.
•       The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford — the classic anatomy of the American funeral business that lends this episode its central question.

“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made their ideas even more compelling. It was the seduction of the American mind, especially its elite campus version. Innocent times with forty years of hindsight.
Emily Eakin caught this Eighties fever for French theory at Harvard. Now an editor at the New York Times Book Review, Eakin has written The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, which is both a confessional of her own seduction and a serious piece of intellectual history.
A self-described farm girl from Indiana — albeit one whose Francophile parents once left her waiting at a Paris nursery school because a Lévi-Strauss lecture went overtime — she fell for theory as the intellectual equivalent of a little black dress. It looked expensive, even off the rack, she confesses. For a middle-class Midwesterner, it seemed like a passport to Left-Bank sophistication. All you needed was the jargon, the black clothes and, in Eakin’s case, the opera gloves.
But her Frenchmen, Eakin warns, turned out to be a slippery bunch. Lacan was so difficult that professors cancelled their own classes rather than teach him. Althusser murdered his wife. Foucault’s histories were as much fiction as fact. Not even Derrida took Derrida seriously. These were the men undoing the “master narratives” while an enthralled generation of cross-legged young feminists in their little black dresses took notes.
And yet Eakin’s Frenchmen may have the last laugh. Their theory of language — an impersonal system requiring no human at its center — presciently describes today’s AI revolution. Foucault predicted that “man” would be erased like a face drawn in sand on the beach. Forty years on, that tide may be engulfing us all.
Five Takeaways

•       The Little Black Dress of the Mind. Eakin grew up in a family of Francophiles — one of her earliest memories is her mother arriving late to the Paris maternelle because Claude Lévi-Strauss’s lecture had run over — and arrived at Harvard as a middle-class kid from a middling Midwestern high school, painfully aware of the gaps in her education. Theory offered the shortcut: it didn’t matter what you’d read, only how you read. The cliché about the little black dress is that it looks expensive even bought on sale off the rack at Macy’s, and theory, Eakin says, was its intellectual equivalent. It was also, frankly, sexy — young professors in jeans lecturing on the masturbation of the comma in Henry James, as Lorrie Moore’s barely-parodic parody had it, and students dressed in black. Eakin went as far as the opera gloves.
•       System Replaces the Self. After the war, Sartre’s existentialism made every accurate thought an authentic act of resistance — a heroic message for a France humiliated by four years of Nazi occupation. But the postwar world was not being changed by individual actors, and Lévi-Strauss dismissed the whole business in Tristes Tropiques as “shop girl metaphysics.” Around the time the Berlin Wall went up, Althusser routed Sartre at the École Normale, and a new philosophy took hold, obsessed with vast impersonal forces: not humans controlling events but a structure — with language at its center. The moment that fascinated Eakin is that sixties moment when system replaced the self.
•       Difficult by Design — and Easy to Distort. A colleague of Eakin’s at the Times was once assigned Lacan’s lecture on The Purloined Letter; a few minutes into class, the professor cancelled it, admitting he didn’t understand the text he had assigned. That is the level of difficulty in question. Underedited and self-indulgent, Eakin the editor concedes — but each Frenchman left behind one bold idea worth the struggle, like Lacan’s mirror stage, in which identity is formed outside ourselves in an act of misrecognition. The difficulty carried a price: it made the work easy to parody, and conservative pundits handed the public a distorted picture. The Frenchmen never said truth doesn’t exist, Eakin insists. Their message was to beware political claims masquerading as eternal truths.
•       Slippery Politics, Awkward Pasts. Foucault, insecure about his thinning hair, shaved his head, ditched the suits, and by 1970 was in the streets with a megaphone defending prisoners, immigrants, and workers — and he was in San Francisco at the start of the AIDS catastrophe, which is reason to take his politics seriously. Derrida was temperamentally otherwise: nothing follows from deconstruction, as Stanley Fish put it, and the moment of silence his classmates held for Stalin at the École Normale was a bit much for him. The posthumous exposure of de Man’s collaborationist journalism hastened theory’s American demise. And there was the paradox Eakin only saw while writing the book: men undoing the master narratives, and a generation of feminists — herself included — enthralled to them. De Beauvoir was the indomitable exception, awarded second place in the agrégation by jurors who could barely decide between her and Sartre.
•       The Frenchmen’s Revenge: AI. When the chatbots got good, American linguistics went into a tailspin: Chomsky’s account of language as a uniquely human, embodied endowment cannot explain a machine producing sophisticated sentences. The structuralists’ theory — language as an impersonal system in which meaning derives from how words differ from one another — describes generative AI rather well, and scholars such as NYU’s Leif Weatherby are now calling for a structuralist revival to understand it. De Man called language a machine; Foucault wrote of the proliferation of authorless discourse; Eakin’s recent New York Times essay argues Foucault foresaw everything from AI to the deep state. The Frenchmen, she thinks, would be fascinated rather than appalled — and would remind us to be just as wary of AI’s language as of anyone else’s.
About the Guest

Emily Eakin is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She has worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, an ideas reporter for The New York Times, a fashion features writer at Vogue, and a deputy editor of Lingua Franca. Her features, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. A Harvard graduate with graduate degrees from Columbia and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, she lives in New York City. Her first book is The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory (Penguin Press, July 2026).
References:

•       The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin (Penguin Press, July 2...

We’ve done plenty of abstract shows on American Christian nationalism. But this one is about a single family: the Greens of Oklahoma City, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail empire, and probably the wealthiest Christian nationalist family you’ve never heard of.
 
According to investigative writer Michael Blanding, the Greens have amassed a $14 billion fortune from selling glitter glue and popsicle sticks. In his new book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, Blanding reveals what he insists is this billionaire family’s quest to craft a Christian nation.
 
Hobby Lobby is an all-American story — especially in its ridiculous ironies. A fundamentalist fortune built on bead-buying hippy consumers. The business came out of the Sixties counterculture. That said, the Greens have built the closest thing to a Christian corporate behemoth. Hobby Lobby has no corporate debt, is closed on Sundays, pays above average wages, and has a founder, David, who still flies coach. And yet this is the same Trump-loving corporation that forced its warehouse laborers to work during COVID and denies them birth control coverage.
 
And then there is the Museum of the Bible, blocks from the Capitol — God’s base camp, as it’s known — stocked with 40,000 shady artifacts including a $1.7 million Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, and forged Dead Sea Scrolls. Such are the absurdities of life in Christian MAGAland. Render unto Trump what is Trump’s. Then deduct, forge or steal the rest.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Most Influential Family You've Never Heard Of. Hobby Lobby is an $8 billion business with a thousand big-box stores, and the Greens are worth $14 billion — among the richest people in America — from what Blanding calls the perfect recession-proof business: when times are good, people buy crafts, and when times are bad, they make things instead of buying them. David Green saw the waste at the TG&Y department store chain in the sixties, started making picture frames in his garage, and — by his own account — owes the takeoff to the beatniks and hippies buying beads. The family credits God rather than themselves: chosen, anointed, and bearing no responsibility for the wealth.
 
•       True Believers, Not Hypocrites. Whatever else the Greens are, Blanding insists, they are not hypocrites: they genuinely believe everyone is going to hell without Jesus, and they live accordingly. No corporate debt, wages well above the minimum, closed Sundays to honor the Lord, a founder who flies coach and lives modestly in Oklahoma. The record cuts both ways: during COVID, warehouse employees worked unmasked in hundred-degree heat after David Green’s wife had a vision from God that the company must stay open. And the 2014 Supreme Court case over birth control coverage made Hobby Lobby a national flashpoint — half the country boycotts it, and the other half shops there precisely because of it.
 
•       Seven Mountains and the Attack on Pluralism. The Greens work within the democratic system, Blanding concedes under Andrew’s devil’s advocacy — but they are associated with Seven Mountains dominionism, the crusade for evangelical control of government, law, entertainment, and the other commanding heights of American society. Steve Green, David’s son, is on record that there is one true worldview, incompatible with all others, and that pluralism should not exist because the rules are laid out in the Bible. His Bible curriculum for public schools taught scripture as reliable historical truth. This isn’t guilt by association, Blanding argues — it’s what the family says in its own books and interviews.
 
•       Trump as Cyrus. David Green came out against Trump in 2016 — an op-ed, a Fox News appearance, support for Marco Rubio — as a poor example of moral leadership. Then Trump became the nominee, the Supreme Court became the prize, and the family fell in line with the movement’s theology of the imperfect vessel: Trump as Cyrus, the pagan Persian king who freed the Jews and delivered for the faithful without being one of them. To their credit, Blanding notes, the bet paid off — no president, including the professed believers, has pushed conservative Christian exceptionalism further through the courts and executive orders.
 
•       God's Base Camp: The Museum of the Bible. Blocks from the Capitol sits the Greens’ Museum of the Bible, stocked with some 40,000 cuneiform tablets, papyri, and Torah scrolls acquired in part to prove the Bible historically true — and acquired, it turned out, from shady dealers. The federal government seized the $1.7 million Gilgamesh Dream Tablet as looted from Iraq; the museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls proved to be forgeries; and the acquisition machine doubled as a tax strategy, with artifacts bought cheap, reappraised high, and donated for deductions so large they sometimes paid for themselves. Radical Christian conservatives held their conferences there — one called it God’s base camp. Ingenious, entirely legal, and, in Blanding’s telling, entirely revealing.
 
About the Guest
 
Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, Smithsonian, and The Boston Globe Magazine. His previous books include The Map Thief, a New York Times bestseller; The Coke Machine; and In Shakespeare’s Shadow, the subject of his last appearance on this show in 2022. His new book is The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation (PublicAffairs, July 14, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation by Michael Blanding (PublicAffairs, July 14, 2026). Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times: “Blanding is at the height of his arts and crafts.”
 
•       Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) — the Supreme Court case in which the company successfully argued it need not provide insurance covering birth control, and the moment Hobby Lobby became a national flashpoint.
 
•       The Museum of the Bible — the Greens’ institution blocks from the Capitol, whose looted Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was seized by the federal government and whose Dead Sea Scrolls proved to be forged.
 
•       Seven Mountains dominionism — the movement seeking evangelical Christian control of government, law, media, entertainment, and the other commanding heights of society.
 
•

“I want someone who has regrets. I want someone who’s learned the hard way. I want someone who understands that life is made of those messy compromises.” — Joel Christensen on the Odysseus he hopes to see in Matt Damon
 
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is out — the controversial movie of the year, much of the controversy raging before anyone had seen a frame. So, before either of us had seen the epic, I talked to the CUNY classicist Joel Christensen, author of the timely Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero.
 
What, I asked Christensen, did he most dread about Hollywood’s treatment of his beloved Odyssey? His answer: a hero too noble to be interesting. The Odysseus of the epic is a survivor, a scoundrel, an antihero — the master sergeant who does what needs to be done, from engineering the Trojan Horse to making sure Hector’s infant son doesn’t survive it. Christensen’s worry about Matt Damon came down to one word: too likeable. What he wanted instead was a man with regrets — De Niro in Raging Bull rather than anybody noble.
 
So did Christensen get the Odysseus he wanted? Below is his review, written after seeing the film when it came out.
 
Postscript: Joel Christensen’s Verdict on the Film
 
Nolan’s Odyssey is not Homer’s Odyssey. This should be clear to anyone. Nolan faced an almost impossible task well: ancient audiences knew the story already. Modern audiences do not, so he created a ring structure with the beginning union of Penelope and Odysseus anticipating the reunion at the end, also introducing plot elements like the dog Argos and the pin by which Penelope will recognize Odysseus.
 
The film is not Homer. Homer’s power is poetry; the film’s is image. Some of the images are striking: the scene when Circe turns his men into animals is the most arresting in the whole movie, showing everything that can be done with visceral imagery and a slight adaptation (Circe here is a survivor of sexual assault).
 
The changes made to the plot such as omitting the Phaeacians, Nestor, Laertes, the bed and more are not as jarring as some of the general decisions. Calling “Zeus’ Law” “do unto others…” makes an understandable translation to a Christian context, but it is somewhat nonsensical for Homer. Depicting a mutilated Helen is a strange decision that I am struggling with.
 
What the movie gets right is making humans responsible for their own suffering. In a novel take on Odysseus as a traumatized warrior, the hero spends seven years with Calypso eating Lotus to forget the loss of his men. Damon, too likeable, regrets the trick of the Trojan Horse after witnessing the slaughter during the sack of Troy. We find out as well that the “sea people” from history, bringing an end to the “civilization” are actually the Greeks returning from the Trojan War and suffering for the transgressions they committed there.
 
Is this ending an echo of Zeus’ plan to end the race of heroes in the Trojan War? Is it an allegory for our civilizational collapse in the future thanks to technology, environmental catastrophe, and fascism? Any potential social critique dissipates with the movie’s end. The traumatized veteran turns out to be merciful and kills only some of the suitors, showing many mercy. Then, guilty of violating “Zeus’ Law”, Odysseus happily goes into exile with Penelope, leaving Telemachus to be king.
 
There’s no way to make Homer’s Odyssey into a film and convey all its ambiguity and depth. That would be an unfair expectation. Nolan’s film is a compelling spectacle and it makes me wonder more about how it reflects who we are as an audience. Do we need the hero to be ultimately good, even if he messed up? Are we so simple that we need to hear about Zeus’ Law and the Sea People so repetitively? I fear that in this age where fiction and fact are so hard to disentangle, that we long for narratives that are just simpler.
 
We don’t get the Odyssey we want; we get the one we deserve.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Complicated Man: The Translation Problem. Every word of Homer carries echoes no English can hold, and the fights over Nolan’s dialogue replay the fights over translation. Emily Wilson detonated a controversy by rendering polytropos — poly, many; tropos, turn — as “a complicated man,” alluding at once to Odysseus’s travels and the many forms of his character; Daniel Mendelsohn’s “man of roundabout ways” does the work too, if you can stop thinking about rotaries. Even the objection to Tom Holland’s Telemachus saying “dad” collapses on inspection: Telemachus uses the colloquial form in Homer. And the “authentic” dialect purists want was an artificial amalgam that no ancient Greek ever spoke.
 
•       The Culture Wars Come for Homer. Nobody remembers a brouhaha over Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy — a pretty bad movie, Christensen notes — but Nolan’s Odyssey generates more controversy than a scholar can track daily. Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen is attacked as inauthentic by one side and as cultural appropriation by the other; since 2015, classicists have watched the Western tradition weaponized by the alt-right while their own field argues about who owns it. Christensen’s advice channels the epic itself: between Scylla and Charybdis, take Scylla. You’ll lose six men. The alternative is losing the ship — and if the story doesn’t persuade in three hours, nobody will remember the armor anyway.
 
•       The Valence of Violence. Modern audiences are more accustomed to represented violence than any in history — you don’t need Natural Born Killers when Twitter serves unverifiable clips from Gaza and Iran. The question Christensen brings to the film is what the violence is for. Uberto Pasolini’s The Return gave Ralph Fiennes’s Odysseus a steady, untroubled thump of arrows; the epic’s own slaughter of the suitors, read closely, approaches Tarantino-adjacent parody. And the hardest tests are the atrocities the adaptations always cut: the mutilation of the goatherd Melanthius, and Telemachus hanging the enslaved women. Does the violence glorify the hero — or show what even the best of us are capable of?
 
•       Keep Penelope Ambiguous. The great interpretive question of the Odyssey is when Penelope knows the beggar is her husband — the suitors, dead in the underworld, are convinced she was in on it all along. The epic grants her remarkable intelligence and agency, then reins it in: Agamemnon’s ghost praises her by way of insulting all women, and she vanishes from the text. Christensen’s advice to Nolan wouldn’t be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, which centers the women’s voices; it would be more screen time and total ambiguity — no access to her mind, a wife who matches her husband in wits and may even have outwitted him. Though based on Nolan’s arc, he doubts we’ll get a woman at the center.
 
•       Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Christensen’s worry about Matt Damon was simple: too likable. Odysseus is the master sergeant — the one who takes the hard orders, tricks Achilles into the war, engineers the Horse, and makes sure Hector’s infant son doesn’t survive to rebuild Troy. The ancient hero is neither good nor ...

In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O’Reilly argues in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have hated. Musk, O’Reilly reports, believes that SpaceX will become “worth more than the rest of Earth”. The merchants are becoming princes, O’Reilly warns. And the rest of us are becoming peasants. Such is the road to serfdom in our AI age.
 
So who should own the AI in our bewildering age of multi-trillion dollar start-ups like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI? Or as That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare asks in his latest editorial, who should own the “intelligence” of our AI age?
 
Keith uses a bottling plant as a metaphor to describe our dilemma. Since no single entity can own this intelligence — the sum total of our common experience — charging us for it would be like seizing the Earth’s water supply and selling it back to us, Coca-Cola style, in plastic bottles. Except that the Hayekian Keith approves of the bottling process. Private companies, rather than governments, he argues, are most suited to doing this.
 
For Keith, this dilemma is also an opportunity to redistribute the ownership of intelligence. He argues for a “Human Wealth Fund” into which every consequential AI company should put a slice of its equity. In the manner of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, this fund would be distributed to all citizens.
 
Rather than Denmark, now we should become like Norway, a tiny homogenous nation with a cultural distaste for Muskian individual wealth. Not very realistic, I fear. On top of that, it’s hard to imagine our tech princes collaborating on anything. Musk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms while Altman and Amodei, who also loathe each other, are focused on their IPOs. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which presumably would coordinate this fund, is pitching a $100,000-a-month fast feed of the president’s posts.
 
Keith’s question, “who owns the intelligence”, is the right one. But the answer won’t come from trickle-down funds set-up by our tech princes. Such supposed munificence is about as likely as America becoming Norway. Read the fine print of any “Human Wealth Fund” set up by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. As we should know all too well by now, when a “revolutionary” Silicon Valley gives stuff away, it turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. Free plastic bottles of intelligence, anyone?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Intelligence, Not AI. The week’s framing shift: the word AI is too small, because AI is merely the tool for harvesting and delivering the thing itself — intelligence, the sum total of our common human experience. Keith argues the renaming is not semantic but political: the moment intelligence sits at the center of the discussion, everyone’s opinion has to be shaped by what it actually is, and the idea that any single entity could own it starts to look as bizarre as owning the world’s water supply. Andrew’s rejoinder: they’re still just words — though he concedes intelligence is the better one.
 
•       Bottled Intelligence Is Good — The Question Is Who Benefits. Keith refuses the critic’s role: bottling intelligence, like Google’s bottling of the world’s words into search, is a good thing, because only massively capitalized private companies can innovate at that scale — and between private entities and governments as owners of intelligence, he’ll take the companies every time. What’s wrong is the distribution of the benefits. Even insiders are complaining: Alex Karp is publicly angry at OpenAI and Anthropic’s pricing, while China’s Kimi K3 — released the day of recording and, Keith claims, better than Claude Fable — signals that very good models are about to get very cheap.
 
•       Capitalism Adam Smith Would Hate. Tim O’Reilly argues in The Economist that Musk and his type are building a capitalism Smith would despise — founders as monarchs, a point Henry Farrell reinforces with a slide from Peter Thiel’s startup class placing the king of a monarchy and the founder of a startup side by side. Keith’s response is characteristically unsentimental: Smith would have hated everything since the Federal Reserve, and the founder-king structure — Larry and Sergey’s voting shares, Zuckerberg’s special rights, corporations bigger than countries with user bases bigger than China — is simply the stage of capitalism we’re at. The question is whether there’s a path from here to somewhere better.
 
•       The Human Wealth Fund. Keith’s path comes in two versions: government-down, a sovereign wealth fund holding AI equity for every citizen; or company-up, the AI companies voluntarily endowing a global fund — and it only takes one to move first, because everyone else would have to react. His proxy is Norway, where every citizen benefits from ownership — not payouts, ownership — in the oil fund; AI revenues, unlike Norwegian oil, could eventually drive most of a doubled global GDP. His critique of the Brynjolfsson economists’ much-signed statement is that “must act now” is vacuous: he’d have added a point four naming the actual mechanism.
 
•       The Bet. Andrew’s counter-case: Musk and Altman loathe each other, the mob hates AI so thoroughly that no pro-AI politician can survive, the states from Newsom’s California to Florida are embracing nothing, New York just enacted the first data center moratorium, and the founders — eyes on their IPOs — are in the pockets of the banks. Hence the wager: 5% of the Teare Wealth Fund says no Human Wealth Fund this year, and none in the twenties. Keith declined the bet, on principle: he’s an advocate, and only through advocacy does public opinion change. As Andrew put it: keep fighting the good fight — maybe one of the crazy ideas will stick.
 
About the Guest
 
Keith Teare is the founder and editor of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, and Andrew’s weekly co-host. A British-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, he was a co-founder of TechCrunch and runs the Palo Alto–based venture firm SignalRank. He and Andrew have been arguing about technology — productively — every week for years.
 
References:
 
•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter; this week’s editorial argues that the word AI is too small, and that the central question of the age is who owns intelligence.
 
•       Tim O’Reilly in The Economist — on Elon Musk building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate, quoting Musk’s claim that SpaceX will become worth more than the rest of the Earth.
 
•       Henry Farrell — the big tech critic’s companion piece, featuring the slide from Peter Thiel’s startup class that plac...